I needed this campground.
The sun is shining, the air is fresh and there is a slight breeze blowing. I sit in my husband’s lounger, the one we bought last year for Father’s Day, the one I covet and steal any chance I can. The kids run around the yard and laugh. They roll down the hill and climb the rock pile. For a moment I have forgotten all the chaos that has consumed our everyday life. For a moment the world seems peaceful and normal. For a moment I can breathe.
It’s the beginning of May (at least I think it is). I must remind myself regularly what day of the week it is because I can’t keep them straight. We’ve been in quarantine for nearly two months and every day blends into the next. We’ve been navigating, pretty poorly I’ll admit, work and school from home. Between the meltdowns, we are trying to hold it all together. It’s a constant struggle of, “am I doing enough?” If there is a balance between work and school, I haven’t found it. Every assignment I submit feels insufficient. Remember that “Covid Schedule” that was circling Facebook? The creative and structured mom that was keeping her kids on routine? Yeah, we did that for two days and then failed miserably. Now, between the excessive phone and tablet usage, I squeeze in 30 minutes for school work. I run to my phone every ding it receives to reply to emails and meetings so my boss knows I’m valuable. This is life right now and it’s hard. You turn the news on and turn it off feeling less hopeful than before. You open Facebook and close it feeling more frustration than joy.
Lately the only things we look forward to are warm days, ordering take out and baking (yes, two of which are food related… I know). But this week brought some reprieve. A few days ago the governor allowed for private campgrounds and parks to open. If you know my husband, you know he wasted no time calling up some campgrounds and booking us a location. With the warm weekend on the horizon, I was excited too. We also picked a place close to my family and made plans to see them for the first time in six weeks. We have done our best to keep a distance from my mom and dad as both my grandmother (in her 80s) and my great aunt (in her 90s) live with my parents. With each passing week, it became more difficult and, hopefully, less necessary to keep the divide.
I didn’t realize how much I needed this trip until I was there. Sitting by the fire, music on the Bluetooth, kids smiling while they roast marshmallows and crack jokes with their cousins brought a stillness to my heart that I hadn’t felt for a while. I didn’t forget what was going on in the world, we still have to say no to the playgrounds, tell the kids to wash their hands and stop touching everything. We still have to remind our four-year-old that there is a virus and that is why we can’t do things as we once did. We still have to say “no” when he asks in his sweet, innocence, “is the virus gone?” Life is not normal, it’s not easy, it doesn’t feel safe right now; but for a minute, for a day, for a weekend, life felt okay. The sun was shining, the grass was green, the fields were wide, the flowers were in bloom, the bunnies played in the grass and I sat there taking it all in, reminding myself that it’s okay to disconnect and forget about everything else in the world. It’s okay to breathe in these moments and feel happiness. I will eventually feel again the sadness, frustration and the hopelessness of everything but today I can laugh, I can smile and I can embrace everything in front of me. Today I can sit in this comfy chair, feel the sunshine on my face, hear the birds, as well as the semi-trucks down the highway, and I can imagine that life is normal and wonderful and full of promise. I needed this weekend, I needed this trip, I needed this campground.
Written by Fawn / RV East Coast
