Today’s prompt: How do you live in a landscape so vastly changed?
Beats me. I’m working on it every day, but 19 weeks into this changed existence, this changed landscape, I have no idea. I mean, I’m living, but I’m not living-living. I’ve gotten out of bed almost every day. I go to work and do my job. Technically, I am living in this changed landscape. Perhaps it’d be more accurate to say I’m living on the surface of this changed landscape. I can word it any number of ways, but syntax changes nothing; I hate this changed landscape.
People talk about a “new normal.” I’ve used the phrase many times myself when adjusting to kids moving out or moving back in, changes at work, changes in health. Normal things. Maybe something has to be normal in the first place before it can be involved in a new normal. Kids living at home is normal, but so is kids moving out. Changes at work are normal. Taking medicine in middle age is normal. All those “new normals” were manageable because they were imaginable.
Outliving our children is not normal. It’s not something we imagine; instead, it’s fodder for nightmares. Maybe that’s why this “new normal” destroys me.
People tell me I’ll adjust. That I won’t forget, but that I will adjust–learn to live with it. Maybe. It’ll never be normal, though. My normal died beneath a gnarled cedar tree one afternoon in August.
.Disclaimer: This was a tough one.
Woods Writes 