I just bought a beginners embroidery kit because I saw an ad for it in my Insta Reels. I watched the whole ad, mesmerized as I watched a needle and thread travel through fabric to form a perfect little bee and something inside of me said “Cindy…this is a need.” Normally I skip right over those ads without blinking an eye. I don’t know, man. This ad just spoke to something in my soul. I listened to a lot of NPR as I traveled between home and Mom’s. I got the beginning of this episode of Hidden Brain and the episode started with stories from listeners talking about their time during the COVID lock down. Every single story was sad and mostly all centered around the isolation. When the lockdown lifted, the consensus was that people were happy to gather with friends and family. That first get together after months of isolation brought excitement and joy, but over time the same kind of gatherings started to lose that initial sparkle. On my way home, I caught the next part of this story where Tali Sharot, a neuroscientist, explained what was going on inside the brain as we habituate our daily lives and how to find that sparkle of day to day life.

Maybe that embroidery kit is an attempt to reintroduce some sparkle.

While the lockdown introduced a level of anxiety I had not experienced since Chris’s illness inside of me, I’m looking back on some parts of it and feeling a longing for the good old days of isolation. [Side note: Did I mention that moment when lockdown became official and I drove my car over a retaining wall and got stuck? Three large fellas happened to be across the street and they lifted (yes, lifted) my car off the wall, declared that everything looked okay and I drove off. I only told Michael about it months (possibly a year) later when we drove by the now broken retaining wall.] If I set aside those moments where I was panicking about losing my job and trying to climb out of my skin from feeling like a caged animal, the lockdown wasn’t really all that bad. My house was the cleanest it has ever been and I spent at least two hours every day on my yoga mat. We experimented with challenging Bon Appetite recipes and murdered our first two lobsters. I kept a sourdough starter alive, something that I need to restart because suddenly people in my house remember the pizza dough I used to make with it and want pizza.

The summer months are meant to be the time when I do what ever I want and forget about the daily chores. I have not transitioned into this idea very well. To be fair, we did hit the summer running. Between theater camps, kid camp, moose hunt and another theater camp our calendar’s have been full. Earlier this week, I opened my Google calendar on my iPad and it was sitting there open when Michael walked by. He said “Your calendar looks like Donkey Kong.” I think he was referring to all the color coded boxes arranged in each day of the week. I was in the process of re-doing our dry erase calendar for the month of July. Wait. I’m about to confess something that is going to make everyone’s eye twitch. I have my Google Calendar. Then a work calendar through my work email. Then I have a dry-erase calendar for everyone in the house. At one point in time, I had my Google calendar connected to the TV screen on our refrigerator as reference in case I missed something for the dry erase calendar. Our TV did an update and I never reconnected my calendar. Look, just forget the part about my fridge having a TV because TVs in fridges are dumb and unnecessary. Trust me. I see the crazy as I write this.

While my calendar might remind Michael of a video game, I will say that the month of July is the most open, unscheduled month I’ve had in ages. I finally see some space for doing whatever I want. Museum date with Melissa on a Thursday evening? Yes please. Yoga on Saturday mornings? My mat is already in the car. I’m going to turn my focus to the daily feeding of a sourdough starter. I am scraping out more time for yoga and while Michael and the Cabbage take their train trip to Saint Louis, I’m going to clean behind all the furniture. Okay…that’s a chore, but I want to do it and I’m doing whatever I want.

I’m going to poke a needle and thread into bits of fabric, making flower and bee shapes.