Conforming.

My girls were determined that they should each have a face mask sourced for them & I have to acknowledge, I haven’t rushed to do so.

This is not because I’m reckless & not adhering to caution or anything remotely resembling this: For the past 12 weeks, my girls have enjoyed outings only to open spaces when they’ve not been inside the safe confines of either home with me or their father’s house. They have been fortunate & lucky enough to breathe in what I’ve considered to be clean, fresh air- possibly the freshest it’s been in a long, long time.

On all our walks, we’ve felt our interactions between ourselves & the natural world to be really quite palpable. I wrote about this at the start of lockdown but I will refer back to those early thoughts when I say that the world has been quiet & content in its rest & it’s as though we’ve been invited in to tread carefully around our surroundings. This, I like to think my girls & I have done quite well.

I suppose then, buying the masks might suggest a move away from this type of interaction with the natural world, back to the every day hectic interactions with a world that’s rushed off its feet & doesn’t have its priorities aligned accordingly.

That to me, is a terrifying thought!

But at least, for now, I have met the requests of my children & once I get my head around it, I’m sure the masks will come in useful as we begin to carefully venture into the places where we know we’ll be required to use them.