Still a life worth living

There can be meaning and joy in doing the little things amidst the gloom and doom of the pandemic.

IT is exactly two years since I retired. I wrote about hanging up my spurs on July 17, 2019, just three weeks into “My life as I never knew it”, as I smugly titled the column.

I went on to say how I was coping without my maid who had coincidentally gone back to Indonesia for a two-month break. I patted myself on the shoulder for heroically taking on housework and caring for my old mum all by myself.

What else? Oh yes, I promised to declutter my house and sort my recyclables better. I made travel plans and was looking forward to a six-month break before taking on freelance writing or editing jobs.

I had it all planned. Or so I thought. You know what came along and smacked us all off-kilter.

If we count from the first movement control order (MCO) in March 2020, we have been in pandemic mode for 15 months now. That’s quite a long haul and in all my years as a journalist and writer, I had never seen an issue hog the headlines for such a long time as Covid-19 has. I tried not writing about it in my column, but there was just no escaping it as it simply overwhelmed our lives and continues to do so.

Despite vaccinations being ramped up, our current movement restriction remains because our infections didn’t drop to the desired level. The news has been bleak elsewhere, too. In many parts of the world, including countries that thought they had turned the corner with high vaccination rates, like Israel and the UK, the Delta variant of the virus has led to a new surge of infections.

We lost 2020 and it looks like we will lose 2021, too. All the gung-ho plans by many governments to relax restrictions, reopen their economies and return to a semblance of normalcy this year are hanging in the balance. Pity Japan and its decimated Tokyo Olympic dreams.

My birthday is in June – hence my name – but I was in no mood to celebrate despite my family’s attempts to cheer me up. Any silly sense of heroism has long evaporated. Like many, I have awful moments of feeling really down and aimless.

Yet, despite the gloom and doom, I am grateful for many things. The first is for my family members in Malaysia and overseas who have remained safe and healthy. Triple touch wood!

I am also grateful that I am able to comply with the stay home directive without much difficulty because I have a comfortable house with enough space for all family members who are working from home.

I am so grateful that we continue to have a steady supply of electricity and water and regular garbage collection. I am actually super grateful we in Selangor haven’t had a really bad unscheduled water cut in the last six months. Touch wood again!

Another unexpected “benefit” of being forced to stay put is my discovery of my neighbourhood. I was an indifferent resident for almost 20 years who hardly ventured beyond my road. My excuse was that I was the busy newspaper editor who worked long hours, often coming home after midnight.

Over these past months, I have finally come to know many names and some faces of my neighbours, thanks to the WhatsApp chat group created by our persatuan penduduk. And what a lively, interesting and interested lot of people they are! The camaraderie comes through in the jokes, information, photos, videos, homegrown fruits and plants they share. These are real people in the houses I pass by.

And I do that a lot now as I walk and jog along the streets in my neighbourhood with my children, something I had no time nor inclination for previously.

As for decluttering, I managed to clear two storerooms and the garden shed. The latter saw me sadly throwing out a lot of Dad’s expired and rusted stuff.

I reorganised my pantry and refrigerator and was abashed to discover how many expired food items I had. When I tackled my kitchen cabinets, I junked lots of Mum’s unusable utensils and freebies like drink bottles. But in the process I rediscovered gems like her wood and copper scraper, kuih bangkit and kuih kapit moulds and Dad’s handmade barbeque skewers.

I got round to opening up the seven boxes I brought back from the office. Enough time had passed to allow me to say goodbye to the numerous project proposals I had written, the minutes of countless meetings, notebooks and reference materials that had so much sentimental meaning in my previous life.

My biggest sorting challenge, however, remains: My clothes and shoes! How I enjoyed dressing up for work and social events, complete with my empowering high heels. In contrast, the present me is the total hausfrau who lives in comfy cotton shorts, sweat-absorbing Ts and house slippers.

I think I will cry really hard clearing this lot because of the full realisation that I am now too fat to fit in most of the clothes and my brought-down-to-earth feet can’t take the pain of my gorgeous stilettos anymore.

As for recycling, after much nagging, the family have come around and they wash and dry takeaway food and beverage containers and put paper, plastic and aluminium discards in separate bins.

But the one thing I have really done well is upping my baking and cooking skills. It gives me a lot of joy and it is ego-inflating when friends and neighbours buy my bread, cakes and pies.

Finally, I have developed a fondness for gardening. While I have grown a few new plants like sweet basil and ginger with the help of my trusty maid, my new mission is really weeding.

For years, I have left the mowing and trimming to my part-time gardener. But during the first MCO, the grass grew really long and weeds set in. Love grass (Chrysopogon aciculatus) was sprouting all over. Brush past them, and you’ll find their spikelets sticking fast to your clothes, hence the name.

They are a nuisance so I am waging a war against them. I have been pulling them out by hand every chance I get. The strange thing is I find it very therapeutic. I get great satisfaction in clearing patches of them.

It also brings back memories of my Dad setting us children to the task of weeding the lawn. To motivate us, he would pay us one cent per weed. I used to run up to him, all excited, with my little hands full of love grass for him to count.

Every time I duck walk my lawn in search of the weed, I think of Dad, have a bit of chat with him and smile at how many cents worth of weeds I have snared for that day. That’s the only part I love about this pesky weed.

And so this is my two-year-old life. Stripped down and housebound as it may be, it is still very livable, for which I give thanks.

The views expressed here are the writer’s own.