Opinion

OPINION | GARY SMITH: A family get-together brings back the joys of living, but covid lurks

Some lessons learned on a family trip to a cabin

The Lovely Mrs. Smith and I, as well as some of the progeny and progeny's progeny (grandprogeny?) and their spouses (the progeny, not the grandprogeny...yeah, I know, gets confusing) all took off to sleep in the woods.

Let me qualify that. We didn't literally go "sleep in the woods." We went to a cabin in the woods. All right, all right, further qualification – it wasn't exactly a cabin. It was a house, complete with things like air conditioning and refrigerators and beds and bedrooms and showers and such that happened to be in the middle of some trees that, in at least some iteration, are a forest.

I make all these qualifications simply because I don't want to engage in any outdoorsman "stolen valor." I have been there, done that and have the T-shirt, which still features burn holes from some unsuccessful campfire hot dogs and stains from ointment for various bug bites.

At this point in my life, sleeping on the ground has lost a lot of its luster. As if it had any luster to begin with. And if it still holds that luster for you, well, it's definitely a world of differences, a reason there are different colored crayons in the box. But I didn't wake up snuggled up to a rock while I was supposedly enjoying myself.

And enjoy myself I did, knowing I wasn't going to sleep outside in the general vicinity and reach of things that would like to eat me, either in small or large bites.

For one thing, I got to observe a few things that might not have been so obvious if we'd stayed at the Casa del Smith. For one, the amount of equipment it takes to care for progeny has increased substantially, and I thought it was substantial when I was caring for progeny.

I used to think a fold-up bed was the height of child care portability. Now there are sleep pods for babies, monitors for babies, backup monitors for babies, ankle alarms, diapers, bottle-making machines, bottle-cleaning machines, machines to clean the bottle-making and -cleaning machines for babies, more diapers of various sizes, diaper bags, assorted holsters and devices for carrying babies, wagons, seats, book and toy bags and, eventually, usually last but not least, actual babies.

Which is why the bravest thing people may do is not necessarily having children but traveling with them.

Also, in a largely unrelated but salient (at least to me) observation, S'mores are the cupcakes of camping in that I have yet to find a way to successfully eat either one. And S'mores exist merely to teach children about patience ("Honey, if you don't actually hold it close to the flame, but not too close, all you've got is marshmallow on a stick.") and delayed gratification ("Honey, that was smoking about three seconds ago, so, yeah, it's gonna be both sticky and really, really, 'leave a blister on your tongue' hot.").

But there was something else I learned. I've missed this, the whole "family and kids everywhere and stuff piled up and food all over the counter and handing out juice boxes and assorted people feeding assorted babies that might not actually be theirs" thing. More than I thought I would and more than I remember.

It's been a rough two years, and part of the challenge of that time is the gradual acceptance of our diminished interactions. We've gotten so used to not being with family, we forgot how important it was. We were keeping ourselves safe, but safety and happiness weren't the same thing.

Now we've decided we're going to live with covid. And that's a reasonable step. At some point, we can't stay locked in the bunker and we have to come out and see the sunshine. That's the "living" part.

But there's the "with" part. Reduced as it may be by vaccines and therapeutics and treatments, we are still at risk. Every day we hear of people acting safely and still contracting the disease that gripped the world and killed thousands if not millions.

We're still taking a chance. And we have to learn to live with that just as we have to learn to integrate back into the lives we have longed to live for the past two years. "Live," we're pretty excited about. It's the "with" part we haven't necessarily figured out yet.

As much as we want to, we're not out of the woods yet. Even if we don't actually have to sleep in them.

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