Hope

I think it’s what keeps the idea of heaven afloat

The saddest words of tongue or pen according to John Greenleaf Whittier are It Might Have Been and I’m not here to contradict, but I have two that are at least equal to and quite possibly greater/less than depending which side of the fence your rose-coloured half-full-or-half-empty glasses are. Here’s how it went down or came up, again, depending:

Due to spilled tea my laptop’s situation is, and this is putting it lightly, grave, so I’ve been administering a sort of CPR in my way

I have it open and on my lap and my mini iPad is elastic banded to its dark screen and on its unresponsive keyboard I have hockey-taped a portable keyboard I got in the summer thinking I'd write on my iphone when I was in Thunder Bay but this is the first time I've used it, and I am mouseless so typing carefully because backtracking isn't q cinch.

I am hoping that with the typing motion it’s used to, my laptop will come to, sort of like the way you talk to people in a coma and watch for their eyelids to flutter

I have iCloud but don't know exactly what it is but am not freaking out because I think everything that was on my desktop is somewhere. Isn’t it? I mean I pay extra for more iCloud real estate which feels like maybe I bought a star or something, but I hope it’s worth it, I mean my desktop was so full it looked like an M.C. Escher sketch – you didn't know where to start – and everybody swooned when they saw it and made the assumption that I am one of those disorganized-with-care people who although engulfed in chaos know where everything is.

Which I’m not and I don’t

But I wanted to talk about something else, something I saw that got me thinking about Hope, which is my favourite word next to Yes and by next to I mean right beside.

They were calling for a snowstorm on Sunday, just an ordinary one but still I decided to get my stuff done on Saturday so I could stay home and watch it through the window on Sunday with dinner cooking and bread baking and later popcorn popping all of which came true, but there was a definite slant on things as I watched those giant snowflakes, they were extra large and beautiful, the kind makes people say I love snow.

Hard to see between the flakes but I was trying and you probably think I was looking for my iCloud but I was looking for something else

Saturday I’d gone to the local Asian market where they have different produce always so fresh it practically jumps into my cart all the colours and textures and melons and other fruits I've never seen anywhere else and veg that resembles sea urchins.

I got what I wanted and on the way out I saw on the bulletin board the saddest thing I've ever read and that includes The English Patient and Hemingway's unbelievably tragic six word story.

It’s also the most hopeful thing I’ve ever read especially January in the snow belt:

M I S S I N G B I R D