Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

The other day, as I was sitting on our couch that takes up ALL of the living room, I pondered life’s mysteries through the steady melting and growing of icicles on our awning.

It was a fascinating exercise, especially considering that it was about 100 degrees below zero and by rights there doesn’t seem like there could be melting of any kind.

And yet, as the sun’s rays poured down on the snow in sub-zero temperatures, I watched the steady growth of the icicles with a sort of fascination that only a lack of coffee can produce.

Ironically, I don’t remember which of life’s mysteries I was pondering, exactly. Ideas these days come and go from my mind in a fleeting sort of method and I shouldn’t have to remind you, dear readers, of a certain flightiness your humble author sometimes displays.

No doubt, it has contributed to many of you wondering out loud just where I was going with some thought or another.

Fear not, I often wonder the same thing as I talk to myself about such queries out loud and yet to myself. Within itself this is a mystery worth pondering should you have five minutes in the drive-thru of your favorite drive-thru restaurant.

As to what I was thinking on the day of icicle melting, it couldn’t have been too important of a thing as I sit here faithfully relating to you the forgetfulness of my thoughts in general.

These are strange days, so perhaps it shouldn’t surprise anybody that that simple idea of melting icicles was enduring enough to play a major part in my column this week.

It’s often easy to be distracted by these sorts of simple things because they distract us from the everyday events that we’ve come to find so depressing.

Looking at you, pandemic.

We’re looking for ways to get away from the realities of these strange days we find ourselves living in. It’s like a David Lynch movie that veers in so many confusing directions, only to wind up at some sort of conclusion we tend to overthink about later.

Understandably, we are all wanting to go back to some semblance of normal and those early straws that even hint at normal are eagerly taken up.

It’s tough each day to work through a restricted life, even if it’s understood it’s the right thing to do now. So we watch the melting of icicles and appreciate it as a moment of calm in a period of time we just as soon forget.

And with a little bit of hope, we will see more melting icicles in the weeks to come and feel the sunshine one more time.