Month: August 2025

Posted in Life

The streak

Posted on by Sharon

I’m not talking about the Ray Stevens song here – I thought I’d better preface that in case you think I’ve taken up running through the grocery store with no clothes on.

This is a different kind of streak, a streak that requires memory, persistence and consistency. You have to remember to do the thing that develops into a streak every day. You have to build it into your – in my case morning – routine, so that you don’t lose your streak through forgetting.

At first it’s easy – the stakes are low; it doesn’t matter if you don’t do it when you have a streak of just one or two, or even ten or twelve. But when it starts getting over 50, there’s a tingle of motivation to keep going. You play around with it, testing yourself out to see how much you really do care, to see how serious you are about it.

You start to brag to other people you know who have their own streaks – or who at least challenge themselves on a daily basis. I’m on 150 now. I’m now on 200. I’m closing in on 280! You feel a weird sense of pride, tinged with a fear that it might end. You ask your husband for hints, you read the blog to pick up what others have said about it, you try a different starting point each day.

You also need to get it right – your streak is over if you make too many errors – and so you proceed cautiously, being more careful, taking more time. My morning routine was such that I was having to get up half an hour earlier, just to get it done. Or getting to work later!

I make it to 300! I don’t post about it on social media of course, that would be weird, but I do feel pretty good. Close to a year’s worth of luck and determination, and new approaches, and risk, and remembering.

But then, Thursday, August 15 dawns. I’m not well, I rush, I get to the last attempt, feeling oddly confident. I couldn’t possibly be wrong.

I sit there open mouthed when it turns out I am.

My streak ends at 303.

303 days of getting Wordle right – and then, in an instant, my streak is gone!

I had wanted to get to a year … and I came so close!

And the thing that hurt just as much as losing my streak?

There was no acknowledgement of my 303 days of success. Just a ‘thanks for playing! You’re out of guesses.’

Brutal.

Posted in Family, Life

After the big thing, the little things

Posted on by Sharon

The bananas have been sitting on the kitchen bench for over a week. She sees them when she rinses her coffee cup, and when she’s making the kids’ lunches on the days she’s working, and she sees them on the days she’s not working. They shrink just a little each day and she wonders if she should do something with them, but she’s not much into banana bread and her mind won’t stretch to more than that.

She gets furious with the toaster. It burnt her toast twice last week, partly because she was distracted and partly because it has a mind of its own that switches back to level 6 when she’s not looking.

And socks. How many feet are in this house? And the way they just expect to be paired up like nothing happened. Seriously!

Because, she’s discovered that after the big thing – the really big thing – come the little things, the mundane things. The MyGov password reset loop. Dealing with the bank. Not knowing how to deal with the bank. The text from a well-meaning friend saying “let me know if you need anything” when she’s already forgotten how to need things. The email reminder that the phone bill is overdue.

The mountain of tiny normal things that didn’t get the memo that her world had changed.

Maybe the little things are a kind of mercy. Something for her brain to busy itself with while the rest of her recalibrates. You can’t solve death, but you can wonder why the kids have suddenly stopped eating bananas. You can’t rewrite the awful bits, but you can yell at the toaster for making anything more than warm bread.

There’s no real point to this. I’m not even sure why I started writing, except that a few weeks ago she said ‘you haven’t written a blog post in ages’. It’s taken me a while to get my thinking straight and my head in the right place.

My thinking is this: if I ever was, I’m no longer convinced by people who respond to loss with wisdom or insight. I’m not convinced that grief makes you wise. It certainly makes you sad and angry and empty and …. The world, in its relentless striving for normalcy, doesn’t stop to accommodate the strange new reality, or the sadness or anger or emptiness or ….

It just keeps serving up the little things: the unmatched socks and toast that’s too brown and overdue phone bills and washing that won’t do itself. As if that’s all there is to be done.

And maybe for now it is.