Count your blessings – 2020 is over

I cannot wait for this year to be over. You know how they say you should count your blessings?

Well, to keep my head in the festive game, in this spirit I sat down to make a list of good things last Monday – and dropped an entire mug of hot tea on top of my laptop.

Count your blessings: there was more tea in the pot.

Already I had no internet after the neighbour’s tree surgeons cut through our wires and now I had no computer.

I’d gone from techmageddon to complete compucalypse.

Count your blessings: I don’t take sugar and sweet drinks are death to computers.

After trying the computer-in-a-bag-of-rice trick, the next morning I rushed to the computer shop. Two nights and R6 600 later, we were back in business.

Count your blessings: it was fixable.

While the computer was on holiday, I borrowed Himself’s old laptop so I could prerecord my radio show online, for which I used another neighbour’s internet.

Count your blessings: the neighbour willingly shared her password.

My radio show broadcasts on Sunday afternoon. On Sunday morning I went to check that all was well, but the whole thing had disappeared from the system.

My carefully curated “seasonal songs” playlist, all the scripting, all that recording work, gone.

Count your blessings: nobody died.

Except my dad died during the lockdown and I find myself struggling with that every day. My brain knows it; my body finally grasped his physical absence when I eventually got back to SA in October.

However, my heart – the part that wants to hug him, to have a chat with him; and my soul – the part that yearns to know he’s looking at the same sky as me, breathing the same air – well, they’re still trying to catch up.

I’m not sure if this is to do with mourning long-distance, or the pandemic, or just the fact of mourning full stop. I’ve never done it before.

Count your blessings: at least I’ve still got my mum.

At least Trump is gone. At least I’m not starving. But if you’re listing what didn’t go wrong, that’s not a gratitude list – it’s clutching at straws.

Count your blessings: 2020 is nearly done.

Jennie Ridyard.

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