
Bing. Easter hat parade.
Brrrr. Cross-country run.
Beep. Best mate's birthday dinner.
Ping. Football training.
Cancelled. Cancelled. Cancelled. Cancelled.
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Weekend away with visiting family? Flooded out.
Lunch with girlfriends? Three in iso, best reschedule.
My daughter signed up for AFL four weeks ago. Hasn't pulled on a boot yet. COVID. Rain. COVID. Rain.
My son spent all last night making a deeply strange Easter bonnet - a maniacal bunny sitting on the crown of his head. Super proud. This morning? Listless, pale, feverish. Benched.
How's your Easter looking? Third year in a row we're heading into it thinking - maybe? Maybe the holidays will happen. Maybe we'll get to go to that place we booked to do that thing we planned to do with those people we wanted to see.
Small potatoes, these things, in the scheme of the world and everything in it. In the face of the new, true horror of war, and of homes drowning in suffocating mud. In the face of 16 Australian women dead at the hands of men who were meant to love them. In the face of loved ones lost to this damned pandemic, and to hacking coughs and fainting fevers and countless people still grappling with never-ending lingering fatigue.
Still. It all adds up, this inability to count on anything. It messes with our heads.
It tempts us not to plan at all. To hide from the things that probably won't happen anyway. What's the point? As Ted Lasso was shocked to hear: after all, it's the hope that kills you.
Best, perhaps, not to hope. Not to dream about that holiday, not to book tickets. Not to accept that invitation. Not to ask those people round.
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My son is young enough that he doesn't really remember pre-pandemic times. Not really. So he only shrugs when the birthday party doesn't happen, when 'home' is always the default venue and someone's always missing from everything.