Visiting Backyardia (One Star. Would not recommend.)

I spent some time in the yard today contemplating the horror that is our lawn and the backyard fence that is crooked as a dog's hind leg. This is what passes for a trip out these days. The front lawn. The back lawn. Fence inspection. These are things I need to do, granted, but when they're the high point of the day, well...
And I started thinking about the trip we aren't going to take this summer to celebrate our 15th anniversary. It was going to be a grand, multi-generational thing with my folks and other relatives and I was really looking forward to it, and now I'm almost positive it isn't going to happen, so hey, why not spend the money on a new fence or hiring someone to fix the lawn?
...

We could spend it on a cement trough, too, I suppose. Because that's the practical thing to do. Because there's not a need, really, to go visit a country where they don't talk in English and they don't even want to!* It's much more responsible to save the money, anyway.

I hate this.

I am just guessing here, too, but most, if not all the kids' summer camps will not be running. For the first year, ever, I got them signed up early for different camps and they were both so excited to go. But Dr. Fauci's "weeks," while better than "months" don't inspire confidence that it will be safe for my kids to go off to sleep away camp in June.

I do realize that this is a First World Problem of the grandest degree because there are folks out of work, and who don't know if, at the end of all this, they're going to be evicted because they got laid off and $1200 doesn't go all that far in most places. People don't know if there will even be jobs to go back to. Hospitals are overcrowding and there's not enough equipment. There's so much. So I know this is an irrelevant problem, but knowing that doesn't make me feel any better about it.

And then, of course, there's the real, underlying fear that in two months, I'll come back to read this and think "Oh my God, this is what you were worried about? This? This trivial, nothing thing?! What's wrong with you?" And I will be thinking that because the unimaginable has happened, and I am wanting to go back in time to shake myself for grieving such an unimportant loss as vacation or summer camp.

But that's where I am. Except right this moment DH is online for the first time playing a multiplayer dungeon crawl using Tabletop Simulator with his friends and it's actually working. And he's laughing. Little chuckles and big hearty guffaws that have been such a rare sound that I was startled by the first one. And I'm so grateful his friends insisted on trying this.

So maybe, in this moment, it's okay to grieve the tiny things in the same way we are grateful for the little things and not feel unworthy for any of it.

Be kind to yourself, friends.


*it's a reference to "Our Town." My mother will get it.