‘Hope springs eternal’: Here’s to better things ahead as holiday nears
Roads Less Traveled
Ahh, Christmas 2020.
This is one that most of us will remember forever. But perhaps not all that fondly.
As I write this on the Tuesday morning before Christmas, I should be contemplating my 1,200-mile drive to Texas beginning later this day to visit my daughter and twin grandkids in San Antonio.
I go there every year for Christmas – and have done so since I moved back to Tennessee in 2008 to take a new job as a business writer for The Tennessean in Nashville.
Now semi-retired – except for my fulltime job here at The Courier News – the holiday trek would have been the high point of the holiday season for me.
Not this year. I’m not going to spell out the reason, because all of you already know why I’m staying home.
Living in Andersonville on the edge of Norris, a place that makes me feel as though I’m in a park instead of a neighborhood, I have been able to enjoy some of the holiday spirit manifested in the many well-decorated homes throughout the town in this holiday season.
My own Christmas decorations are sparse this year, mostly due to apathy on my part, as well as my busy schedule covering the news of the community. My wife and I have two small, artificial trees sitting on a chest in our front window, complete with lights and wired-on ornaments.
They’re wired on for a reason. There are nine cats in our home — all rescues— and a few of them view those trees as exciting new playthings. When we got up Tuesday morning, both trees were lying over the side of the table with their tops touching the floor, evidence that cats are, indeed, nocturnal animals.
No worries. Remember, the decorations are wired on. We set the trees back up, gave Alexa the command to turn their lights back on, and they were good to go. That is, at least until the feline elves play again.
But as disappointed as I am at not getting to travel to Texas this Christmas to see family there, or even to North Carolina to visit my two sisters, or to West Virginia to commune with my wife’s family, I feel very blessed this year.
We’re healthy, as is everyone else in our family. We haven’t seen each other for a while, but that’s for the best, considering.
Just a few days from now, we’ll be turning the page on the year 2020, and with the new year comes the promise of better times.
Some questions persist.
Can we get back to normal in 2021? What will “normal” look like? Will we be able to see family and friends we’ve had to avoid for most of this year?
As the English poet Alexander Pope wrote in his “An Essay on Man”:
“Hope springs eternal from the human breast;
“Man never Is, but always To be blest.
“The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home,
“Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”
Those are words to live by at this point in our human history.
God Bless you all, and Merry Christmas.