Rewarding myself

When I work hard, I play harder. Playing includes writing and mailing letters, scribbling in my diary and reading or looking at art. Last week my daughter brought up a package I ordered from Nina L. Yuson consisting of her book Nina's Travel Sketches: Europe, a set of her postcards and another set of her heart-shaped, hand-sewn thingamajigs. The last will be trimmings for our 2020 Christmas tree, and yes, we're going all out in trimming the tree as an exercise in joy during an especially harrowing year. My husband Rolly and I take very good care in turning the pages of Nina's book. We find her drawings and watercolors delicate and fragile, even the way the book is constructed with a ring binder. But oh! We gasp at her skill in rendering, from a dog's, person's and bird's eye views, the places in the European continent that we working stiffs can only aspire to visit one day. Those spots remain an unreachable goal, never to be achieved in this lifetime given the swath of the COVID19 virus and our combined budgets. Even the artist, the founder of the Early Learning Center and the Museo Pambata on Roxas Blvd., has her own wish. She wrote in her foreword, "Although this is my fifth collection of sketches to be published, it is still my fervent wish that one day some of them will be chosen to adorn the menu covers of an airline, perhaps, our flag carrier, and what more I could see them on the side of an aircraft!" So what are you #reading this weekend? I'm reading, I'm looking and I'm unusually content.