In my kitchen, pinned against a wall, is a 2020 calendar, with each month featuring a different bird; as I passed it this week, I noticed that it still showed “Sparrow,” the bird for November. I am like many people in the digital world: I no longer rely on printed calendars to keep track of the days of the week and the obligation of those days. I flipped the page to reveal December’s Cardinal and walked outside and down the street, where I found that the neighborhood page had been flipped from Thanksgiving to Christmas.
The Irvington neighborhood I’ve resided in since 2013 is a noted Halloween celebrant. The area goes all in with its decorations, and in the pre COVID-19 days, we partied “like it’s 1999.” This past year saw a more restrained celebration of Halloween, though my youngest granddaughter, at 2 ½ years old, did not know that the few bits of candy that she received were far less than the massive piles of loot that her two cousins were used to collecting. (Their grandfather usually ate all the chocolate.) Next up: Turkeys on the lawns, in homage to the Native Americans helping the Pilgrims to celebrate having survived the privations of a new country. When I lifted the page that pictured the Sparrow, the calendar revealed the December Cardinal.
The night after I lifted the flap, I looked across the street at a house that had also, “flipped the page.” I suddenly realized that the neighborhood had changed its decorations and I had internalized the changes. My neighbor’s yards and fences had been “kooky and creepy,” then briefly, turkey-like and gobbling, and were now of the full-blown Christmas variety. Down the street, where I had first walked past a yard of spooky stuff, and then turkey stuff, I passed Frosty the snowman juggling other snowpersons, backed by a band of toy soldiers. Across from that front yard extravaganza, a great fat blow-up of the famous snowman flops in the occasional wind, waving like a car lot come-on doll. Up the street, a small plastic wiener dog is lit up and decked out in a front yard while behind it, light-projected snowflakes pinwheel across the front of the house. My roommate/daughter brought home boxes of string lights and was only slightly disappointed when I told her that we had no external electrical outlets: she is a determined improvisor, and lights are likely in the near future.
The year 2020 has not been kind to the world, with a global pandemic raging mostly unchecked in this country (though there is some hope on the horizon). The “new normal” that I wrote about in April is becoming, for those of us observing appropriate cautions, merely “normal.” Most of us have dry, cracked hands from constant washing. We apply balms and lotions to those hands, then quickly wash it off with hand sanitizer because we’ve touched the keypad of the ATM. We mask up and maintain the appropriate distance when we shop, and socialize within our “pods.” But our travel, both for leisure and to see other family members, has been curtailed. Indiana is one of the states that is fire red with rising COVID-19 cases, and other states have quarantine restrictions for those of us who dare to venture across the country.
My gesture in flipping the calendar from Sparrow to Cardinal was almost unconscious but I’d like to flip 2020 to 2021 with a clash of cymbals and a ringing of bells, and though the struggle will continue, I think I can see a new and healthier world coming.
cjon3acd@att.net