So that thing, that I’ve been dreading for almost two years? It happened last week. The boy woke up with a runny nose and two lines on his antigen test. And you know what? It was fine. He had a very mild cold, we kept him home for the required six days of isolation, and today he was back at school. The rest of the household is testing negative so far.

I can’t quite wrap my head around it yet, that omicron is a different beast from the previous variants, that the vaccination rates are so high at this point, to the extent that our health authorities are telling us that it might be a good thing to become infected now, to build immunity against later variants. Two years of worry takes its toll.

It’s easy to worry in winter, too. The dark, the cold, the grey and the dirt, it gets me every year, and never worse than during these pandemic winters.

How long has it been since I last went out with a plan to take photos? It feels like forever. So a couple of days ago I put a shiny bauble in my wool hat (because we all need some shiny now and then), fired up my phone camera (to make the process as simple as possible) and went outside to, I don’t know, maybe celebrate? And search, for light, and atmosphere, and whimsy, and life, even here in the depth of winter. And you know what? I found it.

~All the best from Jenny G.