With all this unexpected time on my hands, I feel as though my blog should be bursting with new posts. And yet, in this case, I’ve not made use of the sudden influx of extra hours in the day.  In the past month, I actually feel as though I’ve been busier than usual, much due to the fact that the house is full 24/7.  We’ve been working on projects we said there would never be time to do, but suddenly all there is time.  So, the cupboards are clean, the garage purged, the vacuuming constant, and the project to end all projects is now complete — scanning and downloading all of our “old” family photos to iCloud. 

Our children’s early childhood predates the advent of iPhones, so we are the generation with boxes upon boxes upon boxes of Kodak prints; there were literally thousands.  And often doubles of those thousands because I’m one of those photographers who takes two of everything.  And when film went off to be developed, you didn’t know what you were getting back.  Voila; way too many copies of the same photo. With my husband home now, I decided this was a project “we” needed to tackle, but within hours of sorting through the first few boxes, I knew I was in over my head.  “Let’s just forget this - it’s too much,”  I told him. Truth be told, looking at years gone by is incredibly emotional for me and I was finding it too much.  I get overwhelmed as I process just how quickly time flew, and find myself asking questions like “why didn’t I savor that moment more?” If I could only have my children young for just another day. And it’s not just about our children.  I have gobs of photos in tribute to the animals in our lives, and I find those make me melancholy as well. I think things like “I wish I’d not been frustrated with those Labrador puppies when they were little balls of energy” or “why didn’t I enjoy that horse show more” … the list goes on.  I want to turn back the clock. Alas, it’s one of life’s great lessons.  Carpe Diem isn’t on t-shirts and bumper stickers for nothing.  Seize that day, cherish that moment, they only come around once.  Don’t take it for granted. 

But as I looked through all these photos, I also realized just how good life is.  How lucky I am to have the family I have. How glad I am we made the decision to move to Vermont.  How important it was to our daughter’s growth that we did adopt a million animals.  How ready we were to leave Vermont for New York, and New York for Texas. On and on. And there is the silver lining - reliving the journey.  As we sent the photos off to the family group text we all laughed and cried and reminisced; life was coming full circle.  The farm and the creatures gave shape and purpose to our lives that we now hold in a common memory together.  And for my middle daughter who is far from us during this crisis, it allowed her to be with us as we remembered. 

We will eventually look back on this period of time and reflect that in many ways it was a special time.  I do believe that as frightening as it’s been, as scared as we’ve all felt, we will wish we’d appreciated the “stay at home” time more.  Will we ever have this amount of family time again?  Probably not.  Our lives are normally flooded with comings and goings, social media, television, our children’s daily schedules, work, social lives.  We’ve had to begin a new normal; find simple pleasures and recreate the image of what happiness looks like.  I’m sure if someone had told us one year ago this is what would happen, we’d have laughed.  And yet here we are - wearing masks, face-timing for celebrations and “zooming” for work, realizing just how much we love the people we can’t be with, and the people we are with.

This will be a period in time that we tell stories about. Remember to take some pictures.