“A good laugh and a long sleep are the two best cures for anything.” Irish Proverb
As I mentioned in a previous post, I am currently in the northern countryside of Maryland, helping out my son and daughter-in-law with their two young off-spring.
Oh, and their ten-week old puppy, Divot.
I had been here six days before they left for a family vacation and hadn’t slept very well; it’s not my bed.
The day before they departed, I threw my back out lifting Maddie, my two-year old granddaughter.
Lovely. Slept on the couch for five nights to avoid stairs.
The puppy slept with me. Sort of.
Change is hard.
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Two days into the trip, my son called.
They were staying in a beautiful house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and arrived just in time for the remnants of Hurricane Sally the first couple of days.
“How’s it going?” I asked him.
“Haven’t left the house yet—too much wind. And Maddie was up all night,” he said with a sigh.
And then he laughed. “She pulled a full-on exorcist the next day. Screamed for six hours.”
Maddie is definitely a strong-willed child, but still, I’m not surprised; it wasn’t her house and it wasn’t her bed.
Change is hard.
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The puppy, all sharp-edged claws and razor-like teeth, howled the first night his new family were gone, missing his siblings and new pack members.
Nothing smelled the same, or sounded the same, or felt the same.
I was a poor substitute, it seemed, at least for the first few days, and my scratched forearms reflect his discomfort.
Poor thing, he’s teething and nothing would do. Everything was different. And it wasn’t his bed.
Change is hard.
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It seems to me that the U.S. (hell, the whole world) is experiencing the same discomfort.
Nothing looks or feels the way it used to, comfortable and known. Reliable, assured, certain.
Things don’t look right or sound right or feel right.
Everything feels wrong, “off” somehow: frantic, sharp, exhausted.
Nothing is as it was.
It’s as though we’re all sleeping in the wrong bed.
Maybe that’s why people are so grumpy.
Or maybe it’s that, like Divot, we’re undergoing a growth spurt, and it hurts, and we can’t help gnawing on things—anything—even fingers and forearms.
Maybe what we all need is a good night’s sleep in our own beds, uninterrupted by howls and screams.
That, plus a happy-ending bed-time story and a couple of feel-good lullabies might help assuage 2020’s frantic, exhausting pace.
Couldn’t hurt.
Because change is hard.