Pandemic summer

A lightly edited repost about the first summer with Covid.

My youngest daughter, summer 2020. Poem first posted here.

Isolated for the foreseeable future
we scramble to make summer something 
other than waiting for the pandemic to "end."

My husband lays the calendar on our long table
and marks days like a general planning an attack
for hiking in lonely places with our kids.

They wear masks when the trails get busy
and pull back when a man crowds the path
his cologne hanging heavy after he passes.

After these trips, the kids tumble from the van
wet and dirty, their shoes filled with silt
or mud from a creek, fumbling over each other 

to be the first one to tell the stories from the day. 
My husband brings up the rear, blue eyes bright
but exhausted from the work of making their summer 

something other than what it is: hiding from an illness 
that falls all around us, like sunlight or the smoke from a campfire
burning damply in our backyard.