Rain

I fall in love a little more each day with the way the rain hits a greenhouse roof. I've said before that I want to live in a house with a tin roof just so that I can hear the rain against it, but I think that glass might be even better. 

It rained twice while I lived in Iqaluit- the second time was the very day that I left. It was warm in my house and I was doing last minute cleaning when it started. I opened both doors- right on opposite sides of the house and propped them open firmly so that they could not close, and then I listened to the rain. That house had a lovely tin roof, and the sound was beautiful. 

Here in Chilliwack I have lost count of the days that it has rained. The sound of it fades into the background when it happens so often. Sometimes I forget the wonder that it is. 

Christmas shipping is well underway at Rainbow- each week we ship nearly 1000 carts of mostly Christmas Cacti and poinsettias to Walmarts and Home Depots across BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. I receive lots of angry emails each day about processes that are still being ironed out, but you can only care about so many people being mad at you at a time, and I've well exceeded that limit in this position, so they mostly don't have an effect on me. As time goes on, these things should be sorted out and hopefully eventually the emails and meetings will decrease. 

I have tickets booked to fly to Lac La Biche for New Years, and, assuming COVID restrictions don't restrict inter-provinicial travel then, I'll be there with my family for a few days. It will be my second year away from them at Christmas, but this time I will see them soon after anyway.

I'm surviving. It's not like last year, when, although some things were hard, I found plenty of happy things to blog about. It's harder to find the sunshine here, and it's not because of the rain. Right now is hard. It's hard to think of the future and take heart in that, because no one can predict what the future will look like. It's hard to work 50 hours a week where I have no passion for the work. I'm happy to have a full-time job, but it's not the career I would have chosen. It's hard to find people when gathering is illegal. And it's hard to be two months into a new job, new church, new city, without being sure I love any of it. 

I love the young adults group at my church- in Iqaluit I had no one around my age, but somehow I connected with them on a deeper level. 

I think I'll know I'm home somewhere when I don't compare everything I have with what I left behind. 

- Aliya