Here's a trivia question for you, one that I just made up and one which turned out to be harder for me than the hardest wordle puzzle thus far: which city has the most hotels in the whole wide world? If you say Beijing, then I will tell you that you are one clever bird. Indeed, Chinese cities occupy seven spots on the top ten list of places with most hotels and the other three are Paris, London and Rome. So, perhaps predictable, but I sure wouldn't have put any of those in the number one slot. Just last night I felt absolutely confident that it was an altogether different place -- a city that I intend to visit in the last days of March.
I needed a hotel room. Last week, I did a quick internet search and picked a hotel that would be quite acceptable. I booked the room. But yesterday I went back to my selection. It was made in haste. More thought should go into it. After all, who knows how long the window of travel will stay open for us, right? Let's do things well! Let's make sure our escapes and adventures will be as good as they can be!
That was my reasoning as I plunged into exploring all hotel possibilities in my destination. And there are a lot of hotel possibilities. I swear, every block is composed of many hotels. Hidden ones without signs. Bigger ones with plenty of pizazz about them. Dark alley choices, open plan choices. A lot of hotels.
That more thorough search took up most of the evening and a good chunk of the night. And you know what? I didn't care. I wasn't tired. I was having a fantastic time of it! (And yes, I did find something better: All booked now and ready for my adventure next month.)
But this morning I was, rather predictably, sluggish. Too little sleep. Feed the animals. Sigh. I'm not taking my camera. Too heavy. Don't do anything cute or even mildly interesting, guys, I'm not watching you, I'm not doing much of anything but feeding you and returning to the farmhouse. Yawn....
Breakfast. With yesterday's blueberry muffins. (Ed's still not eating much, though he dutifully sits down with me and takes over cat petting to keep Dance and whoever else has come in out of my food.)
The thing is, most of us feel like it's somehow naive and perhaps even tempting fate to look ahead toward a spring and summer where Covid doesn't dictate every step we take. We've been slammed in the gut too many times. Wont we look back at crazy carefree planning and say with great remorse -- well that was foolish! To think this menace would cease haunting us? Haha. Why, that pandemic, and the one before, and the one before that -- they all kept generating new cases for years! Years! Why should we get out of our quagmire in just two lousy ones? We should have expected three or four or maybe even ten years, because this one is so novel! Of course it's got to be far worse than anything we had in the past.
That's one way to view our future. It's not mine. I don't like dark paths that can only lead to shadowy and uninviting hotels, with the roaches and rodents and filthy public spaces. Let's stick with hope and keep, instead, to the path that takes us to an imagined better place. Eventually we'll get there. Really we will. It's good to start looking for it, even if we are still one foot in the mess of the past two years.
And speaking of messy places and feet stuck in muck, I had to go out and pick up our winter CSA spinach. It's drizzly. It's muddy. It's gray and everything looks like it could use a good scrub. March weather. It felt almost warm. Above freezing for sure. So I went to the zoo.
I have the same mixed feelings as you do about zoos, but ours is free and the animals are there, so you might as well entertain them a little with your presence. Especially on a day when the place is completely empty. Because who goes to the zoo on a wet February day...
So I said hello to the polar bear, the badger, the buffalo, and the one sandhill crane that wasn't given a chance to fly south (I prefer to think he couldn't and we were helping him survive the winter here). And somehow it was uplifting to watch them gaze at me, to see if I would do anything goofy or scary or maybe a little funny. (I'm sure animals appreciate a good laugh.) These guys have a not great life, but it's not totally awful either and they managed to come closer and say hello in their curious ways, and maybe even they took some pleasure in hearing me talk to them in what I hope they interpreted as a soothing voice.
We've had our share of sayings the last few years that turned out to be uplifting one moment only to have us crash the next one, as we realized the ridiculousness of it all. Remember "let's flatten the curve?" Remember "we're all in this together?" Well, this afternoon, as I stood in that wet drizzle of a gray day, I did really think -- hey, we are all in this together aren't we guys... so, go ahead and enjoy your hay or fish or whatever they're feeding you. And try to have a good day! Spring is in the air and soon the kids will be back and you can laugh at their antics and life will be good again. Maybe even joyous!
I'm seeing it. Joyously.
With love.
