My husband and I live in a fourth floor apartment, with roughly 20 meters separating us from the row of apartment buildings in front of us. During the uneventful days of the confinement—which in Spain meant you could not leave your apartment except for necessary errands—every small thing became an event. Looking at the same scenery day after day one starts noticing details one hadn’t noticed before—the type of plants someone grows, the color of the brick of a certain building, and, the surprising number of pets inhabiting those buildings.
We got particularly enamored with a pair of curious cats which lived in the same household and regularly leaned out the open window, called outside by the sun, a human in her balcony or a flying pigeon. The smaller one had white patches up to mid-paws, and the other was a slightly chubbier tabby. We gave them names: White Paws and Fat Paws. Yep. So during any of those quiet days—with barely a single car or person on the streets—a scream would ring in the apartment: “White paws is there! Come! COOME! There is Fat Paws too!!” We would rush out to the balcony squealing and stared at them until they lost interest and disappeared from the window frame. Then, like them, we retreated back inside.
Bette(r) Days celebrates the things that did not suck in 2020. Each day in December, we’ll be posting about the highlights of our collective garbage fire of a year, type-related or not.