All that we have

When we were children our parents would take me and my two sisters on long Sunday afternoon drives in our ivory-coloured Austin 1100. From our home in St Augustine, sometimes we were driven to the airport to see planes, often being fortunate enough to pass under an aircraft as it passed low over the road on its way to touchdown. My sisters and I looked forward to this highlight with an excitement that did not wane with frequency.

Beyond the airport we would meet the grove of towering (in the eyes of a child) pine trees which were (also in the eyes of a child) in the middle of nowhere – even though they were just across the road from the end of the runway. I always loved seeing them. Why were they there? How come they were so different to the surrounding trees? Full of mystery, they brought to mind mystical forests featured in some of the books I loved reading.

Sometimes our long drives would end with family picnics in verdant Valencia or pleasurable hours spent at a river or beach – Toco, Balandra, or Mayaro – digging for chip chips, collecting sand dollars, stones and driftwood, fishing in rivers for guppies which I often took home for my fishbowl.

One weekend, due to a tropical storm warning, our parents cancelled a promised Toco beach day. Any disappointment that my sisters and I would have felt was short-lived. Daddy filled the bathtub with water and added blue food colouring and salt. While the winds raged outside, my sisters and I splashed happily in our own indoor Toco – never for a moment fearing the storm or missing ‘the real thing’.

Fast forward to 2020. The ‘storm’ that ravages the world, albeit of a totally different nature, is such that we are all asked to stay at home. No beach. No long drives. No picnics in nature. And for those so inclined, no doubles... no KFC.

Had we been children of this current ‘covid culture’, would we have understood the full gravity of the situation? In the spirit of blue-food-colouring-in-the-bathtub, what would our parents have done to satisfy our desires?

“We want to go for a drive.”

What comes to mind is ‘The Woodworm’, an impressive but unwieldy-looking go-cart that my childhood friend/neighbour, Marian, and I constructed out of scraps of wood and wheels from old tricycles. We worked assiduously on ‘The Woodworm’ at her house on afternoons after school (primary). The dream of finally test-driving it propelled us to successful completion. In these days of ‘lockdown’, our parents might have encouraged us to do something similar, to keep our minds and hands active – with the promise of being able to ‘go for a drive’ once the go-cart was complete. The ‘highway drive’ would have possibly been along the driveway, with the planes coming in for landing being birds in the garden. With the days of ‘stay home’ being extended to April 30, what would we three sisters have done when the novelty of go-cart drives and feathered flights wore off?

“When can we go for a picnic in Valencia?”

Perhaps mummy would have prepared picnic fare, packed the basket, and the whole family would have gone into the garden, spread a blanket and contentedly consumed the feast in nature.

What if we had lived in a small flat with no garden? Creative innovation always comes to the rescue. Mummy would have rustled up goodies for the basket and spread a blanket indoors. Daddy would have gathered pieces of nearby vegetation – possibly assisted by us, as in the days when we drove to Valencia forest to cut a piece of ‘Podocarpus’ (a local gymnosperm) for our Christmas tree. We children would have been too excited about setting up our forested indoor picnic spot to miss the ‘real thing’.

Some afternoons ago incessant shrieks of joy alerted me. The two little boys from next door were splashing in a huge wading pool. Their glistening silhouettes in a halo of sunlit droplets created a magical scene.

Having never seen them in this pool, I assumed it was a new acquisition. Perhaps they had wanted to go to the beach and their parents had provided this alternative ‘stay home ocean’. In that simple moment, filled with love and laughter, there was no space to miss what they may have wanted otherwise but could not have.

All that we ever truly have is the current moment and what we make of it.