The Trees Are Full of Ice by Liz Flaherty

I wrote most of this for a blog in January of 2021. There isn't ice in the trees today, although it was zero when I came to the office this morning. There is much about today that is cold. Bittersweet. Even though this blog is a memory, it's a reminder to me of how to go on from here. Wishing you diamond days. - Liz

The trees are full of ice today. The sun shines on them and they are just beautiful. It's as if they're covered with a multitude of diamonds. It's funny that the thing that draws our attention to the beauty is also the thing that destroys it, isn't it? Not funny so much as bittersweet. 

Along with the brilliant trees came an ear worm. "Some days are diamonds," John Denver sang, "some days are stones." Bittersweet again, the thoughts of an artist gone too soon, as well as the song itself. 

We've seen a lot of it in the past year. Lived a lot of it. I don't know about other writers, but it's made it harder to create a story. I'm not using Covid-19 when I write, and I catch myself thinking things like they can't go into a crowded restaurant or there can't be a girlfriends trip or even they wouldn't touch hands that soon. Where's the hand sanitizer and they hardly know each other. 

But there have been some good things, too. Some sweet moments among the bitter. I've been writing in sprints, which had been both successful and fun. I'm writing a new story, with people I'm having fun getting to know, in a subgenre I'm not completely comfortable with.

I'm finding during this up-and-down time that I have new resentments, new things creating changes I'm not sure I want. I read curmudgeonly posts on Facebook that both annoy me and...gulp...I can identify with, and I hear these words from the song: "More and more I can see there's a danger in becoming what I never thought I'd be..."

Oh. Okay. 

Bittersweet is beautiful. My grandmother kept it in a little copper vase that hung on the wall. It's also, according to some reports, toxic. So is giving in to the bitterness that comes visiting every day. But we can learn from it without giving in. We can use it without giving in. The days that seem to be stones from sunup to beyond sundown, what Anne Shirley called "Jonah days," exhaust us. And yet, this is how we do it, isn't it? One day at a time. One foot in front of the other. Without giving in. Watching for diamonds.