Easter thoughts

Every time I hear or read the word “quarantine” I think of gentian violet, the antifungal ointment I saw used on my younger cousins when they had measles after me. The color is a psychedelic purple that makes your hair stand on end. In the same way, maybe, that my hair stands on end at all the text messages I’ve received lately. Jokes. Many of them corny. All sorts of things. Many of them useless. But there is one message I received that I thought was beautiful and appropriate. It read:

I do not consider isolation having to stay at home with whom I love.

Isolation is what the seriously ill are experiencing.

Stop saying that you are bored, upset that you can’t leave the house, while everyone in the hospital wants to go home. Thank God if you have to stay at home because, despite everything, with money or without, with a job or without, you are in the best place you can be, at home surrounded by those who love you!

Perhaps it is time to transform your house into a wonderful place to stay, a place of peace and not of war, of embrace and not of distance. Look with different eyes at the situation you are experiencing!!!

Make your house a party: Listen to music, sing, dance.

Make your house a temple: Pray, pray, meditate, ask, thank, praise, plead.

Make your home a school: Read, write, draw, paint, study, learn, teach.

Make your house a store: Clean, order, organize, decorate, label, move, sell, donate.

Make your house a restaurant: Cook, eat, try, create recipes, grow spices, plant a garden.

Make your house, your family, a place of love.

I think this piece is beautiful and very thoughtful. In my head I have a list of things I need to do and I do a little bit every day. I need to check on the contents of the pantry collected from our trips to the supermarket and buying in multiples. Once I asked my husband to buy a small can of pimentos for me. He bought three big cans. They sit there, simply waiting.

This would be the perfect time to review all the cans. How many cans of mushrooms are there? What can we create from them? How many blueberries are there from the time he fell in love with blueberries? I remember once buying instant noodles and never seeing them again. They must be hiding in there.

But I do a little every day. For the past three days I have been knitting and watching a Turkish Netflix series that I chose because I saw it had 50 episodes. The leading roles are always played by very beautiful and handsome people. The plots are very similar to ours and the photography is gorgeous. It has English subtitles. I enjoy watching them because I don’t have to look at my knitting. I’m knitting a simple sweater that I will decorate with beads later. The knitting is boring. That’s why I’ve chosen a drama with 50 episodes to entertain me while I knit.

Today I will start to fix the shelves in my workroom, sort and clean shelf by shelf, one shelf a day. That way I don’t get too tired. I have already finished fixing my closet and given away more than half of my clothes. It took almost a whole week to do that and I’m still not completely finished.

That’s one thing I think we should remember as we live. Nothing will ever be completely finished until we die. Even building a house. It will be finished for a while, then we will start to think of repairs and additions. Or we will decide to sell it and buy a new one, which we will eventually also repair or redecorate to make it look different. When we die our children will either take it over or sell it. Nothing will ever be completely finished because we are always changing.

One of my friends took a picture of her calendar and said “A long weekend!” for Holy Week. I remember when I was working, treating Holy Week like a vacation. But now that we are all quarantined I keep thinking of the visita iglesia we used to do with my grandmother, when we would visit churches and pray within. I remember praying the Way of the Cross. I wonder if we can do that now. Is it going to be on TV? If it is, I will pray along with it because I need some guidance. In the end I remember Easter Sunday in the US and wearing a pretty hat to the Easter Mass.

Being quarantined brings back a lot of memories about the things we used to do when we were young and now we wonder wistfully: can we do them again the way we used to then?

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