Author Archives: bonniedonily

About Spiders

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Well, it’s spring and you know what that means: yep, spiders.

Spring also means washing windows, which is what I decided to do today when the temperature climbed up into the high teens. But washing the windows meant removing screens and and that meant there was plenty of time that my house was left vulnerable to Invasion of the Creepy Crawlies. So, I guess it’s my own dang fault for wanting to see out my windows.

To all the spider lovers out there – I KNOW: spiders are supposed to be SO GREAT because apparently their whole deal involves eating a bunch of other bugs. This is what my husband always reminds me of whenever I subpoena him for spider-disposal duty. As if reciting Science Facts will suddenly have me making up the spare room for our new guest. And the last time I looked, I don’t exactly have a bunch of other bugs in my house that necessitates an assassin to take up residence with me.

I have always maintained that as long as Rick is in the house, it is his responsibility to “take care” of any such unwanted visitors. (I’m not going to say “kill” because I leave the means of disposal up to him. Plus, I don’t want to offend any spiders who happen to read my blog.) However, if my male counterpart isn’t readily available, I will “take care” of the intruder myself. Because I can’t take the chance that he’s an extroverted spider who intends to call all his friends to come join him. Or a female spider because: You Know.

Usually this sort of “taking care” involves at least two layers of paper towel, because I need as much protection as possible from any spiderly-body-fluids that may happen to escape when I am “taking care” of the spider. The other thing that always happens when my paper towel blanket “shrouds” the spider (at an impressively rapid speed if I do say so myself) is that a strange sort of sound escapes from my mouth, not unlike the grunt I would probably make if I was chopping down a large tree. I can’t help it anymore than Hugh Grant’s character in Notting Hill can stop himself from saying “Oopsie Daisies.”

It makes no sense, this Rather Large Aversion I have for Critters That Don’t Belong in My House. After all, the spider in the picture above, although impressively large when compared to that door hinge, is still a whole lot smaller than me. And not poisonous. (At least, probably not poisonous.) But they’re awfully fast. And they can bite your face in the middle of the night. And, in some movies, grow to enormous sizes. Or turn you into a leotard-wearing superhero. Which I have No Interest In Doing. At All.

So, out they go. My House, My Rules. Which is why when I discovered a second spider in the shower right after Rick got home today, I made him “take care” of it. And except for the usual speech about a spider’s redeeming qualities, he did so without any weird grunts or girlish epithets. Or even two ply of paper towel.

About Mustard on Eggs

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            In our home, whenever we had hard-boiled eggs, the kids always thought that it was just hilarious and maybe a little gross that I put mustard on mine. Never mind the fact that I always put mustard in egg salad sandwich filling or in devilled eggs. I suppose in that case the joke is on them if they choose to stay out of the kitchen during meal preparation. But to me, mustard and hard-boiled eggs go together just like strawberries and cream or Ritz Bits (cheese-filled) and Nutella. (Try it. I’m not wrong.)

            I have a pretty good idea how the mustard first got on my eggs in the first place: it has to do with Easter. Coming from a Ukrainian and Polish household, it was tradition on Easter Sunday morning to wake up to a breakfast of paska (egg bread), kobasa (good old garlic sausage) and, of course, hard-boiled eggs. All these tasty things had survived a trip to and from the church in a basket on Holy Saturday, where it had been blessed for our breakfast the next day. And nestled among the pussy willows nearly hidden from view would be an unobtrusive jar of mustard. Just a little bit, recently removed from an indelicate yellow French’s jar.

            Since it was breakfast and you didn’t want to overdo it for Easter dinner after church, a small plate was in order. The blob of mustard at the side was originally intended for the kobasa, I think. But with the bread, meat and egg placed so closely together on a saucer, the inevitable would happen: the egg, so round and slippery, would get a mustard bath. At any rate, since we had fasted the two days before (another tradition, but more spiritual than mustard on eggs), it didn’t really matter what was on those eggs before you scarfed them down. The wonderful thing was that it was really good. So good that, Easter or not, I still put some French’s on my hard-boiled eggs.

            This Easter breakfast is more of a tradition to me than the ham or turkey afterwards or even those one pound bunnies lurking around the house just begging for their ears to get gnawed off. This became painfully aware to me the first time that I had Easter away from home. At sixteen, I participated in a school trip to California and Mexico. In my excitement, I only gave fleeting thought to the fact I’d be away from home for the holiday. But once on the bus, I realized that my Easter was not going to be what it usually was. Some friends thought I was weird when I ordered oyster soup on Good Friday, but my conscience kept me from eating meat that day, knowing the rest of my family wasn’t. We arrived early enough at our destination that same day for my teacher-chaperone to find me a church service, especially since our travel plans would preclude me attending on Sunday. But I hadn’t solved my Easter breakfast dilemma yet. Did hotels in San Francisco carry kobasa on their menu?

            When I went to the dining area for a continental breakfast that Easter morning, I had made up my mind to just imagine my toast was paska and be happy with that. But I never had to do that. You see, in our small high school, we weren’t able to fill up our tour bus with enough students so our “Myrnam to Mexico” club opened up the rest of the bus to any senior citizens who wanted to accompany us. And that morning, when I greeted two of the Ukrainian ladies with the traditional Easter greeting, “Christ is Risen!”, they invited me to join them for their breakfast of paska and kobasa. Obviously, they had planned ahead and smuggled the stuff along in their suitcase. So, together that morning we enjoyed a transcontinental breakfast.

            There was no mustard on eggs that day, but hey, half a tradition can be better than nothing. And that was a great deal of comfort on my first Easter Sunday away from home.

About Odd Things

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I finished off the Parmesan cheese the other day, the Kraft kind with the red double flip top that lets you choose what kind of adventure in cheesiness you would like. I washed the container out and put it in the recycle bin but when I went to toss in the lid as well, my hand wouldn’t let go. I took a closer look at it, then put it in the place where I keep “The Odd Things I Cannot Throw Away”.

Sometimes, such “found” items are just…un-throw-away-able. The box that my husband’s Maui Jim’s sunglasses came in with the cardboard top that looks like real wicker? A good holder for my Post-it notepads. The miniature bottle of Tabasco that accompanied a room-service meal in New York? Now a tiny memory that sits on my bookshelf. The stopper from my Starbuck’s coffee? Strangely interesting and even more impressive in quantity (not unlike the collection of bread bag clips I alluded to in last week’s post.)

After my Mom passed away and we were going through her house, I found an old cookie tin on a shelf in the basement rumpus room that held a magpie’s assortment of saved objects: old board games pieces, some wooden beads and some tiny plastic gewgaws that she had saved. This last category held things that could have easily been thrown away, or recycled, like (wait for it) bread bag clips or the lid from an interesting perfume bottle. My own magpie instincts were modeled to me a long time ago.

What did she see in these tiny bits of ephemera? For her, saving these things was a bit like an eccentric savings account, not unlike my father-in-law’s shop where, with a little bit of thought, he is able to forage out the exact size bolt or screw for an odd job. Odd jobs, after all, require odds things. But the odd things are also sometimes gateways to the weird and wonderful, art projects that are so utterly unique by virtue of the the odds that spawned them.

When I was still in single digits, my Mom created for me a Barbie doll house. Now, this wasn’t a typical doll house that could be carted around and it didn’t live in my bedroom. Instead my Mom commandeered three shelves of the closet in my oldest brother’s basement bedroom – and created a Barbie condo. The bathtub? Carved from a blue fabric softener bottle. The clock on the wall? An old broken wristwatch divorced of its straps. The bed-side lamps? Two plastic pop-tops from cheap champagne. (Take a look next time. You won’t be able to see anything else.)

That Barbie doll house has inhabited my psyche for forty years now. I have so many questions: Did I ask for a Barbie doll house or did Mom get the idea on her own? Was it due to the critical mass of tchotchkes that she had saved up that needed to go somewhere? (Not unlike the patchwork lap blankets she cobbled together for all of us from old polyester sweaters and Fortrel pants.) How did my brother feel about having a Barbie doll house – and his elementary school sister playing – in his bedroom? Did I even like Barbie dolls?

I don’t really remember playing with dolls that much, but I do remember that house. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t throw away that Parmesan cheese top the other day. It would make the perfect Barbie ottoman, with storage for Barbie knitting needles and Barbie yarn, a hobby she’s probably taken up during Covid. Barbie is getting older, after all, just like me. But her condo – in my mind – is still a classic.

About Spring Cleaning

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[Today: another throwback post. I find it interesting when I read back my words some twenty years ago how entrenched I was in the role of mothering and domestic engineering. I loved it then – still love the mothering – but the spring cleaning has turned into year round cleaning. More manageable, less odious – not to mention I don’t have three little ruffians upending my efforts every waking hour anymore. Good times. And the gender roles aren’t nearly as strict now. Also: I don’t have much of a Martha Stewart consciousness anymore except to enjoy her friendship with Snoop Dog.]

Every year about this time I have an irrepressible urge to rid my house of all excess dirt, grime, recyclables and of course, any clothing that has mysteriously shrunk in size. As the old adage goes, in spring a man’s heart turns to baseball and a woman’s towards baseboards. Or more specifically, the chocolate milk that seeped under there when one of your children decided to demonstrate jumping jacks, forgetting he had a full glass in his hand.

I always know that the time has come by the state of affairs in my storage room. One look in there and you might think I had some sort of disease, the kind that the absence of many Styrofoam trays, paper towel tubes, milk carton caps and Pringles cans would preclude my normal functioning in life. A symptom of my ailment is my total inability to throw something away (or recycle it) before it has migrated to said storage room and has become part of a teetering tower that threatens to landslide into the hallway if you don’t open and close the door VERY quickly. Which makes retrieving the vacuum cleaner a problem. Which is why the kids have the vacuum cleaner in their toy room. They think it’s an alligator.

I like to think that it’s a frontier quality that I have honed, saving things beyond all reason. One never knows when Martha Stewart comes up with a way of making a “beautiful” giant topiary from several detergent bottles and hundreds of bread clips, which (of course) I have. But having three little boys in the house has foils all my aesthetic intentions. Whereas I envision a teeny tiny skyscraper from the medicine box I can’t throw away, my boys see a weapon of the grenade variety. Cardboard trays? Shields. Wrapping paper tubes? Swords. Which explains the strange ring-shaped bruises that they all sport on their tummies.

And so the second clue that it’s spring-cleaning time is when the playroom is littered with squashed boxes and tubes. The reason it has to be spring when you begin the Big Clean is so that you can send your kids outside for an indefinite amount of time. This tradition dates back to the beginning of history when cavewoman, at the sign of the first thaw, told her children to go play outside and not to come back until she called them. Although she didn’t have a Swiffer or a Dirt Devil, her cleanup was relatively easy, consisting merely of removing all the bones and rocks that had made their way into the cave over the winter and then sweeping it out with a stick that had some dried weeds attached to it.

Of course, all you really have to do is tell your family that you’re going to clean today and they will all miraculously disappear, including your husband. This also dates way back to ancient Scotland when Old MacDonald fled the house and his wife’s feather duster. Picking up a stick in a fit of male protest, he got in touch with his primitive side and knocked a stone flying into a gopher hole, thus inventing another timeless spring tradition.

And so spring-cleaning has also become synonymous for Mommy’s Alone Time. Which makes it a perfect time to forget about the impending avalanche in your storage room, kick back and tune your television to see what Martha’s up to. Or to the baseball season opener. Whatever it takes until the feeling passes.

About the Farm (and Some Pigs)

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“Pigs by the Radiator” Copyright Sharlie Donily

One thing I have been using a lot more during the pandemic is a nice little library app called Libby. It’s like a one-stop shop for all my digital library needs – especially audiobooks. Sometimes when I just want to listen to something while I walk or cook or exercise, I check out what’s available right now – kind of like Russian library roulette. And so, I found myself listening to Charlotte’s Web. The bonus: it was read by the author E. B. White himself.

I came to this classic book kind of late, not reading it until I was in my thirties. I was enchanted then and was enchanted again as I listened last week to a story about a couple of unlikely best friends: a pig and a spider. The setting however, was not unfamiliar to me: a barn with lots of other residents. In the story there are cows, geese, even a rat who goes through his own story arc. And I reminisced a little about when I had a barn to visit like Fern, the girl who saved Wilbur the pig from an early demise.

One of my favorite memories about living on the farm, however, isn’t about me visiting the animals in the barn but the other way around. In the early spring, when a litter of baby pigs arrived but the temperature dipped too low for their safety, my Dad or my brothers would bring a cardboard box of piggies into the house for the night. The box would be placed next to the wall register in my bedroom off the kitchen and I was lulled to sleep by the gentle squeaks of warm baby piggies. (I would pay cash money for a sleep app that featured a “warm newborn piglets in a cardboard box” soundtrack.)

I’m so thankful for having grown up on the farm. Although it was never my ambition to keep being a farm girl, I am glad that I know where my bread and butter actually do come from. I’m re-reading another favorite right now – Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver – about her family’s year-long chronicle with eating a diet of only locally sourced foods, much of which was grown on their own farm. I decided to read this book slowly, enjoying the corresponding chapters with each ensuing month. It starts in March. Kingsolver, an wonderful writer, but also a botanist and a vigilante gardener outlines in the introduction how very far removed most people are from the source of their food. Even a biologist friend, hearing Kingsolver recap over the phone the goings-on in her garden was surprised to hear that the potatoes were “up”: she thought that potatoes only had bottoms, no tops.

Most of us who grow up on the farm know that you name your pets with caution, understanding the caveat that having a name doesn’t mean they will escape their eventual fate like Wilbur the Pig does. (And zero of us knows a spider who managed it.) But there’s something very gratifying about knowing where your Easter ham comes from or the colored eggs (hint: not a bunny) or the asparagus that Kingsolver rhapsodizes about in her March chapter.

Thank goodness for farmers and writers who remind us of these simple life-giving things.

(Oh, and Instagrammers, too!)

About Spring

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It’s happening. Once the calendar flips to March, we can rightfully claim that it’s the beginning of the end of winter. Yes, we still get snow and negative double-digits well into April and sometimes May, but the third month means Spring, like Aslan, is on the move.

And one of the most gratifying things about my long walks outside in spring has to be the puddles, lightly frozen over, that are oh so satisfying to crunch my way through – as long as I am wearing waterproof shoes. What is it about frozen puddles, or melted puddles, that make for such fun for kids? And adults? I think it might be the hidden delight of being about to shatter something with no consequences other than a wet sock if you misjudge the depth of said puddle.

Maybe it’s just all that wonderful water. In the spring, it abounds, causing floods and havoc and deep moisture, a promise for future greenery. When the ice and snow starts to melt, it thaws out our souls as well. Maybe that’s why I get playful in the puddles in the spring.

When I was younger, we had a culvert that crossed under the road near our driveway on the farm. When the spring runoff happened, I would spend hours splashing in the water that came tumbling out one end or throwing sticks in the other, then racing across the road to see if I could beat it. Not unlike the famous game of Poohsticks that Winnie-the-Pooh played with his friend Piglet.

I had such good memories of playing in the water in the spring that when I had my three little boys, I was happy to allow them to wade through the swimming pools that formed in the ditches beside our acreage. They would tread carefully at first, breaking the ice, but then eventually they would start wading through, filling up their boots with water. When they got cold enough, we headed into the house for a hot bath – back when all three of them could still fit in the tub together – and then hot chocolate to warm the outside, then the inside.

It’s here, but it’s a limited time only. Get on your boots. Get out there and have a splash. It might freeze your toes but that’s the price of a little fun sometimes. And it’s worth it for the hot chocolate after.

About Small Talk

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I went to the grocery store this morning for some basics: bananas (because: BANANAS), cream for my coffee, some pasta and a tomato for tonight’s supper. I don’t usually go to this particular grocery store out of the two in my small town – it’s a whole five minutes further by car and that’s usually enough of a deterrent, but I also don’t think the loss leaders are very enticing. And finally, I don’t find the cashiers there overly… well, happy to see me. Not me, specifically, just me as a customer in general.

Except for today. As I unfolded my re-useable grocery bag to scarf away my purchases, the cashier became overly animated about the fact that my bag sported a Cookies By George logo. She positively gushed about how much she loved those cookies – which I confess I also have a weakness for, so much so that I try to donate blood at the Canadian Blood Services location near the U of A in Edmonton because they (pre-Covid) usually serve Cookies By George leftovers. Which I feel no guilt in eating after trading in a pint of my lifeblood.

A couple of things took me by the surprise. First, was the gushing. My previously unengaged food checker suddenly developed a personality and we were bonding over (just the thought of ) a yummy treat. My trip to the grocery store had become like reminiscing about a holiday with its standard observance for consumption of chocolate eggs or shortbread cookies or pumpkin spice lattes.

The second thing was more surprising. I was almost moved to tears by the whole cookie conversation because: COVID. I’m just so tired of the anonymity of wearing masks, the 6-foot distant conversations, the leaning away and the crossing of streets. I am missing small talk and the clerk suddenly disclosing the cookie thing made me like her a little more.

Now, to be clear, I’m not tired of following the rules for the safety of all concerned, including myself. I just am missing the nuances of our Pre-Covid Life: the jostling of elbows in a crowd, the passing of the peace in church, the easy hugs from family and sometimes virtual (the pre-pandemic kind of virtual) strangers. Post-Covid Life is a little less spicy, less interesting and less filled with inane conversations about cookies. But inane conversations that nonetheless make me feel incredibly connected to the world again for Just. One. Moment.

Too often small talk has been given a bad rap. Although I do like to “interview people”, as my husband says, sometimes conversation amongst strangers and acquaintances does not come so easily. But there can be a lot of potential in spontaneous chatter: it can spark a friendship or a romance, it can send out a warning signal (“This is not the friend you are looking for.”), it can lead you to a good restaurant recommendation or indie bookstore when you’re travelling and it can very possibly help you to feel human, like you are included and like you belong.

So here’s three cheers (or at least one) for small talk.

About A Strong Sense of Place

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In Japan, there are more than 300 versions of the Kit Kat bar…including a soy sauce version, a European cheese version and a wasabi version.

There is an 60-room hotel in Sweden that is built every year just 200 kilometers away from the Arctic Circle and, despite being made of frozen water, is required to have fire alarms.

When it comes to cities housing billionaires, Moscow is second only to New York City.

These statements all seem like something fun and obscure you would read in a quirky travel brochure or on a website devoted to interesting trivia about international destinations. And though they sound hyperbolic, they are all true.

Of course, it would be lovely to go investigate these things for myself – maybe some Russian billionaire could front me the $400 per night for a room in the ice hotel (plus the fare for a twelve hour train ride to get there from Stockholm) where I could eat some imported wasabi Kit Kat bars. Except, generous Russian billionaire friend or not, we are still not going anywhere anytime soon. Because: Covid.

Well, then gosh darn it, thank goodness for books. And podcasts. And the Interweb. And armchair travelers like Mel Joulwan and Dave Humphries who have made it their business to read books that boast a Strong Sense of Place and then talk about them on their aptly-named podcast. Although they transplanted themselves from mainland U.S.A. to Prague in the Czech Republic a few years ago with the aim of wandering more, they too are experiencing a travel hiatus. But that hasn’t stopped them from exploring the world through books.

They talk about travel books? Sounds boring, you say.

Oh, trust me – Mel and Dave aren’t a couple of stuffy professor-types discussing only books they found in the Travel Book Co. of Notting Hill – although if the shoe fit, they would. These podcasters are fun and funny and happy to regale their audience about fiction and nonfiction, new books and old, about books written for adults or for children – there are no holds barred. The determining factor is that the book has to have a Strong Sense of Place.

When I was homeschooling my boys a few eons ago, my favorite teaching tool that I hit upon over and over was the idea of unit studies, where everything we learned about revolved around a theme. Indeed, in Mortimer J. Adler’s classic How to Read a Book, he calls this the highest level of reading: syntopical – the reading of multiple books on the same subject. Maybe our reading of multiple picture books and chapter books about dinosaurs or pioneers or famous artists wasn’t exactly the highest level, but it sure did the trick of painting a fuller picture.

Oh! And pictures! This podcast has an affiliated website just bursting with the best photography – all curated for your easy exploring pleasure. Sometimes, because Mel is a Cooker, the photos are of beautiful food that she gives her tried and true recipes for. (She started out with another website Well Fed and some cookbooks of the same name and she never makes you read an 10-page essay before she gives you the recipe.) Dave is a artist who’s website design skills I covet. And – they have a cat named Smudge.

One of my very favorite things I have ever read about reading, I found on their website. Sometimes, even I think: I read too much and I ask myself: What good does it do anyway, this insatiable desire I have to read, read, read? Dave and Mel’s answer: Empathy.

Copyright: Strong Sense of Place

Well, okay then. And now, back to my pile of books.

About Getting Older

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Hello, my name is Bonnie and I’m old.

Age always has been a relative thing. Ten is young to twelve, fifteen is ridiculous to twenty, the thirty-somethings are just babies to forty-somethings and my fifty-ISH is a cakewalk to the octogenarian set. But that doesn’t change how I feel about it. And some days, I just feel kind of like a T-Rex: my skin is scaly, I can’t reach all my itches and I’m gonna be extinct – soon.

Well, not really. But, sort of. The tagline of my blog is The Journey of a Century because of my declaration at age fifty that I was only “halfway there”. But like Bon Jovi’s subsequent lyric, some days more than others I am acutely aware that I am “livin’ on a prayer.”

Let’s talk about my dinosaur skin to start. I seem to be itchy all the time now. I remember In My Youth being puzzled about television commercials featuring senior citizens finding great relief by using a certain anti-itching cream. I understand what that’s all about now. And while many trips to the dermatologist seems to be paying off some for my rosacea (an over-fifty affliction with no rhyme or reason), I have come to the realization that no amount of miracle serum is going to get my face back to its previous Photoshop evenness of coloring. And conversely, no amount of aging seems to be able to put any distance between me and “adult acne”. Let’s not forget to mention undereye circles and (gasp!) WRINKLES. My first trip to the bathroom of the day can be quite unnerving.

Well, that’s not true. The FIRST visit to the bathroom of each day is usually done under cover of night because my over-fifty bladder rarely allows me an unbroken night of slumber. Some nights, I need to stumble there more than once and it doesn’t seem to matter how little liquid I consumed the night before. The really weird thing about going to the bathroom when you are over the proverbial hill: if you sit on the toilet long enough, you can pee twice. And by long enough, I mean a minute.

There are other indications that I’m not the spry bunny I once was: my knees refuse to help me up off the floor – I need the help of a nearby counter to pull me up. Or I just go into a reverse down dog to get back on my feet. Either way, I am thankful for strong arms. And my neck – I am resigned to it never working the way it used to, back when I could shoulder check and not give myself a headache and/or a neck cramp.

But I’m not Complaining. I’m just…Noticing. Out loud.

Maybe what I really want is for someone to tell me that this is all normal(ish), that I’m hitting all the benchmarks at the appropriate times, that I’m above the fiftieth percentile. Because it’s alarming to still feel young in my heart and have the rest of my body mutiny in such a way that tells me otherwise. Or to look at old(ish) photos of myself and then be confused when I look in the mirror and think: umm, that’s not what I remember.

In the spirit of camaraderie, or maybe commiseration, I recently took to the Interwebs to find out how other fifty-somethings were dealing with This Whole Thing. Plug in the hashtags OverFifty or FiftyPlus or SexyAndSilver and you get all the same thing: a bunch of unreasonably good-looking people for their age telling you that It’s All Good, the getting older thing.

Well, I mean really, who’s gonna get anywhere on Instagram advertising bad knees and double chins?

The thing is though…I actually like getting older. Except for the whole imminent death thing, accruing miles (or kilometers) on the human odometer does have its perks. I’m more mellow now, even when I look in the mirror or step on the scale, than I was in my thirties and forties, because like an (actually dying) friend of Anne Lamott once quipped when Anne was worried that a certain dress made her look fat: Honey, you just don’t have that kind of time. I can answer more questions on Jeopardy now- maybe because I’ve lived through more categories. I have more time to go for long walks and write stories and cook healthy-ish meals. I break a lot more rules in writing than I did in English class and I just don’t care anymore. Ish.

I can’t change the marching on of time, so I might as well learn to like the getting older part. The itches – well, maybe I need to get some of that special lotion reserved for the SexySilverSet. Or a backscratcher. I’ll probably get a discount. I’ll let you know how it goes.

About Masks

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Image result for masks in winter

I walked into an appointment yesterday and as I sidled up to the edge of the plexiglass shield between me and the receptionist, I simultaneously became aware of several things at once: the stares of the other clients in the waiting room, the mysteriously cool breeze on my face, the look of horror on the receptionist and the perplexing amount of free-to-infect area between me and that person on the other side of the desk.

I had forgotten to put on my face mask before exiting my car.

With extreme apologies, I quickly donned the spare mask that I keep in my purse at all times. I could have also used the one that I have stashed in the secret pocket of my winter coat or the one that I use as a bookmark in the paperback in my purse or the one that I tuck into my boot in case I misplace all the others. JK. (Sort of.) Once I put my mask on, I returned from The Land of the Shunned and was admitted into the deeper recesses of the waiting room. But I still had to shield myself from some dirty looks.

I am not an anti-masker, just someone who doesn’t emerge from their house that often. I’m also not a germaphobe – no judgement here and I expect none back from the ‘phobes – so I have no internal bells and whistles going off either. With a spouse in a career that had him wearing a mask daily before Dr. Deena told him to, I was given one piece of advice when I complained about either wearing one or not being comfortable: Suck it up, princess.

And so, I have. Besides the obvious Caring For My Fellow Humankind angle, there’s actually a few things I like about mandated mask-wearing.

One: It’s February in Alberta. When the wind chill registers way lower than what the actual temperature is, any extra layer is welcome. I’m not a sissy, it’s the law.

Two: I have rosacea, a skin condition that flares up on any given day (like cold ones) which even the best makeup sometimes fails to disguise. A mask covers up my cheeks and my nose where the redness is most prominent and I don’t have to bother slathering on foundation with a spackle knife. (Yes, it’s an silly insecurity but it’s my insecurity.)

Three: There’s a level playing field out there when everyone has to wear a mask. No one is staring anyone down or saying anything nasty because they’re mask-less. And I no longer have to feel like an oddball in a store if I’m the only one wearing one and I’m not the cashier.

Sure, I look forward to a time when we no longer have to mask up, but I don’t necessarily think masking is going to end when the pandemic does. When we travelled to Asia twelve years ago at the tail-end of the H1N1 scare, we saw many of their citizens wearing masks all the time. It felt foreign to us (well, hello, we were in another country), but it didn’t take long to realize that they just more comfortable with the mask on than without. It might take awhile for many of us to get out of the habit.

Or, at least to that extra cool air on your face.