Digging Our Way Back to Hope

 

We watch the beach change with the seasons.

In autumn, the late afternoon sun casts long shadows across the city skyline and we can feel the water’s chill through our boots. In winter, we navigate chunks of ice washed up on shore and marvel at its beauty, at how inviting the water looks even in the depths of winter.

On this humid spring afternoon, swimming finally seems like a possibility.

My three swimsuit-clad daughters wander down the path in single file. They bring sand toys and beach towels. I bring microscopic mRNA molecules setting off chain reactions in my cells. We are hopeful.
 
But our hopes for swimming are dashed. As we scan the shoreline, we’re not met with the inviting water we’ve been anticipating since winter, but something resembling pea soup. There will be no swimming today.

Of course, the girls are disappointed, tearful even, as I file this beach day away with the rest of the things we’ve missed this year.

I could cry too.

See, we have also changed with the seasons: from despair to hope and back, again and again. Just when we think we might be able to shed winter’s heavy layers, the chill returns.

I survey the water and offer sympathy, but I am at a loss for what to do now: a feeling that has become all too familiar. How do I cushion another disappointment? How do I soothe another loss? Before I can answer, the girls are springing into action, sprinting towards the water.

They get to work on a damp depression near the shore, their tiny plastic shovels slinging sand in all directions. Soon, they are covered in muddy sand, digging their way back to hope.

I am struck, not by a shovel full of sand, but by this perfect metaphor for how they mostly handle the disappointment of a pandemic, for all the times they take chaos and turn it into something beautiful, for all the times they pull us out of despair and into hope again.

Before long, they are splashing in a few inches of clear water at the bottom of an excavation they call a swimming pool. Their renewed sense of hope is perhaps even more satisfying than a swim in an icy lake, for all of us.