This will most likely be remembered as your strangest Spring Break ever. Instead of being quarantined in our house because of the Coronavirus, you were supposed to be at Nonna and Papa’s house in Alabama this week.
Being forced to stay home during your 3rd grade Spring Break is definitely in major contrast to what I was doing exactly 30 years ago in March 1990 during mine.
That was when our family went to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida for the first time.
I specifically remember it being the first time I ever experienced a water faucet with an automatic sensor. I was amazed how I could wash my hands without having to each touch a knob.
And that was only the beginning of the amazing things I experienced in Disney World.
So yes, Disney World vs. lockdown to due the Coronavirus… quite a difference.
While Nonna and Papa were in town a few weeks ago, you spent one afternoon with them digging up little wild onions in the community area of our neighborhood.
I had always wondered why often, it smells like onions when people mow their lawns. Now I know why- little wild onions are often growing in the lawn.
Once you collected several pounds of the wild onions, you washed them off over the sink. Your sister helped.
Now that I think of it, the two of you should have opened a “Wild Onion” stand in our neighborhood. Nothing like a refreshing wild onion on a crisp Spring morning!
If 2019 was the year of my existential crisis (realizing I had reached all my life goals before the age of 40 and having to recalibrate my identity accordingly), then it feels like 2020 is going to be the year of me learning to accept that I have already lived the first half of my life.
Perhaps the biggest epiphany I’ve had about it so far is this:
I spent the first 38 years of my life looking back in nostalgia, foolishly convincing myself that somehow, one day, I will be able to return to the good ole days.
But I will spend the next 38 years aware that right now, we’re actually living in the good ole days that we will look back on and wish we could return to.
These are the good ole days. We’re still living in them.
The only possible way to return to previous good ole days is to spend time with people and share memories of those exclusive events you lived through together.
I think the default in the human experience is to fail to recognize it’s harder to recognize the good ole days while we are still in them, because we are always also balancing out the mundane and negative events happening alongside the good things.
In reality though, looking back, we tend to remember the good memories more than the others. Those good times serve as the thumbnails for our past.
That’s why I felt it was important to write my newest song, “These are the Good Days”.
It is a reminder to make the most of life while we still are alive; focusing on the good things, which are often overshadowed by the mundane and the negative.
You can hear my new song below:
All words and music by Nick Shell:
My life is half way over, my life has never been more in focus
No time machine to take us all back, what’s happened is stuck in the past
These are the good ole days, we’re still living in them
I won’t always be here, you won’t always be here
So shake a hand, shake a leg, soon we’ll all be dead
Don’t want to die, so I’ll try to live while I’m alive
It is an unspoken understanding that anytime you have an extracurricular activity sponsored by your school, it will be just you and me. In most cases, Mommy stays home with your sister, getting her ready for her bedtime which is earlier than yours.
Or, in the case of the Super Bowl Breakfast last month, I dropped off your sister first, then ate with you and your school.
Last night, your school conducted his annual STREAM night, where every classroom in the school becomes a different science experience station.
Your favorite was the one where you got to dissect an “owl pellet.”
As I just happened to learn from one of your library books a few weeks ago, owls can’t actually chew up their food.
Instead, they just swallow it whole, digest the meat, then regurgitate a furball of bones.
After you dissected your first owl pellet, which turned to be the remains of a mole.
You enjoyed it so much, you then requested to dissect a 2nd owl pellet! You were the first and only student to make this request.
The 2nd owl pellet was for a shrew; an animal I can’t differentiate from a mole.
It is confirmed that in our kitchen pantry (not sure how that ended up being the most appropriate place!) there are now two plastic baggies containing the bones of two undigested rodents.
