Changed in These Covid Days (and a gift for you!)
This week, I’m editing my next book and also hosting my sisters at my home! It’s with much gratitude that I welcome Shelli Littleton to the blog today, who is kindly stepping in and guest-posting for me. Shelli’s a gifted writer and a wonderful friend. Say hi to her in the comments, connect with her on Instagram & Facebook, and be sure to check out the giveaway that we’re offering! -Becky
“Will you feed my caterpillars while I’m out of town?” asks my friend. Later, I watch her with scissors in hand demonstrate cutting sections off an outdoor plant exhibiting orange blooms, and she says, “The caterpillars are hungry.” I’m finding that comment comical until we return into the house and approach these crawlers who whittle away the leaves of milkweed to mere sticks. “They are hungry,” I say. We move to the kitchen sink where my friend teaches me how to rinse tiny spiders from the foliage, to add the new greenery to the floral water vials, and to transfer newfound caterpillars with care. With furrowed forehead, I yearn for her to repeat the directions. Cocoons wiggle as she zips up the butterfly habitat cage. This process is complicated.
My mind revisits weeks prior, when life got hard, when I’d longed to close myself off to the noisy world. Because an introvert needs quiet. Sitting in the peacefulness of my living room, alone on that rare occasion, all I could mentally mutter was I miss you, quiet. My whole family has been home since Covid stepped onto the world stage. My husband took over the office, and I moved to a workstation in our bedroom. Books now line the wall of windows adjacent to my desk, where piles of paperwork cover most inches of the desktop, items that used to go into the office. By all appearances, I’ve turned into a hoarder. I have no time alone, no space to myself. Quiet, that private place to pour out my soul through the written word, is absent.
Stifled sobs drain from my person against the unwanted change, and my hair cries to be cleaned and rinsed, as well. But with my husband at a doctor’s appointment a while longer, these solitary seconds are precious. What have you done to me, Covid? Before 2020, I washed, dried, and styled my hair every single day. I shrug a shoulder to the truth that not only does my room offer the impression that I’m a hoarder now, but I’ve also morphed into an every-three-day hair-washing, messy-bun kind of girl. As if these adjustments weren’t enough, a precious woman passed away in 2020, leaving me motherless on this earth.
Oh, Shelli, how Covid has changed you. My heart stirs and my depleted fingers begin to move, as words beg to pour forth from this emotional being.
The ringing phone slices the silence, breaking my meditation, my thought processes. My husband says he’s only ten minutes from home and asks if I need anything. My writing spirit closes down like a flower at dusk.
How will I manage? How will I plot that next story and start that first page? When will morning come?
I sense the Lord whisper into the depths of me … Be grateful, Shelli.
My breath heaves under the weight of guilt, because my husband suffers severe heart issues. I’m thankful for each day with him and with my girls, who will soon fly the nest. Gratitude fills me that my husband kept his job through Covid, that he’s been able to work in spite of his illness, we still have health insurance, we have a wonderful home, and our two daughters whom we adore are successfully wrapping up their university years. Cherish these days, Shelli. How long will we all be gifted here together, in this space that we love so much? You can bear these different moments.
Days later, I delight in the news that monarch caterpillars endured their time with me, surviving through the change, withdrawn from the world, hidden in order to emerge into what God intended one to be, until the fragility of little wings brilliant with color press through the growth, doing their best through this short life.
Fly, Butterfly, fly.
Oh friend, how has Covid changed you?
p.s. If you’ve found your “quiet” disturbed too, my friends Cynthia Ruchti and Becky Melby have released a book, Spouse in the House: Rearranging Our Attitudes to Make Room for Each Other.
This premium butterfly stationery set includes 14 notecards! Enter via the entry box below….
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Shelli Littleton is an aspiring novelist, who writes for Woman’s Missionary Union’s magazine Missions Mosaic. She and her husband live in a little house on a county road in Texas, along with her two daughters, two sheep, three cats, and fox family that they now claim as their own.
Learn more about Shelli’s writing on her website, and she adores connecting with readers and writers on Instagram and Facebook.
