My dearest hope as 2020 ends is that we will never see a year as dreadful as the one nearly done, that never again will the fates frown upon us as they did in the past 12 months, that never, in the decades and centuries to come, will the woes keep arriving one-by-one.
Yet, I don't want to completely forget about 2020, either, because the bleakness of those moments made the good things shine that much brighter.
What is more, since it is human nature to look to the light, these memories in time may overshadow the horrors, enduring long after the image of a madman in a fake Mountie car is as dust.
I will, despite everything, recall how thankful I felt to live where I lived in 2020. In this country, an oasis of sanity compared to its neighbour to the south, but also this province, which is part of a region that won acclaim around the world for how we fought COVID-19 to a draw.
“So isolated” some sniffed, explaining our success. “Hardly anyone lives there,” added others.
But the truth is that our decisive public health response to the pandemic, plus the way that Nova Scotians, rather than searching for ways to dodge the rules, adopted a we're-allin-this-together approach, kept us safe.
I am also thankful that, rather than live in some cheek-in-jowl place, I lived in a province where there was room to roam. A place where, when everything seemed to be closing in, one could still experience the expanse of the sky, land and water until the panic subsided.
I am thankful too for the selfless people who put others before themselves this past year, the people you read about so often in these pages — the public figures whose names we all know, and also the anonymous Nova Scotians “just doing their job” — as well as the ordinary folks who rose, seemingly from nowhere.
They all did extraordinary things to help us through this extraordinary period.
Every Nova Scotian, I am certain, counts themselves lucky for all of these reasons. Yet my list, like yours, is long.
I am as grateful as a man could be to have gone through the Great Pause with my wife, whose unwillingness to be overwhelmed by the litany of woes we all faced, kept the Eeyore in me at bay.
Crazy as it sounds, I am thankful for those damn Zoom calls, not just because they allowed me to work far from a populated newsroom.
I celebrated birthdays on there, trained with my karate buddies, talked novels with my book club buddies, even joined end-of-week happy hours, where friends and I toasted each other, and our abiding good fortune to call Nova Scotia home.
I am thankful, during the long periods of lockdown, for the things that kept my mind occupied: watching basketball, even if in far-off arenas with the equivalent of cardboard cutouts for crowds; solving crossword puzzles even if that involved pointing and clicking online rather than running a pen satisfyingly across a grid in a hand-held newspaper.
I speak here of trying diverting new things like watching The Queen's Gambit, and reading about the Norwegian way with wood, but also revisiting stuff I hadn't thought about in a long time, like the novels of John D. Macdonald, which I am glad that I did.
I am grateful, as well, in those days without bars, restaurants, movie theatres, gymnasiums and music venues, for finding pleasure in small, simple things.
I grew some vegetables in 2020, and experienced the satisfaction of watching something I had planted grow into an edible thing.
I tried, with little success, to learn the names of some trees and mushrooms and a few rocks, but didn't care.
I baked bread of inconsistent quality, but liked it all the same.
I spent one whole day stacking wood in a shed, enjoying it so much that, over the next week, every so often I would go out, open the door and stare at the pile I'd built.
If, at some other time, someone had told me that one day I would stack a couple of cords of firewood, and then take an artist's pleasure in admiring my handiwork, I would have guffawed mightily.
These, though, are the times in which we live. Let us take all the good we can from the 12 months just passed, and hope that we never see anything like them again.
