I was standing in my driveway, armed with a box cutter when a vivid memory divided my thoughts.

It’s odd how the smallest of things at the most unexpected times can bring on a wave of nostalgia, grief, regret, happiness, love; you know, pretty much any emotion.

I mean, it was bin night and I was just cutting up large boxes so that the cardboard would fit in my recycle bin and save me a trip to the tip.

But as I unfolded one before slashing into its corrugated core, I was reminded of the biggest box fort my boys and I ever built during their childhoods.

It was a palace.

The kind the lounge suite had to be pushed up against the walls for and the coffee table taken to another room.

It had an opening and closing door, windows, port holes and a section of open top that was draped in camouflage mesh.

Inside were three makeshift beds, some blankets, a bunch of books, some random toys.

It was forged with the brown papery pulp of around 50 big boxes and more than a couple of rolls of thick packaging tape.

The boxes were from a steady stream relentlessly delivered that had concealed all manner of weird and wonderful things my temporarily twisted mind had ordered, believing I ‘needed’ them, during the hazy days of COVID lockdowns.

It just so happened that those lockdowns were also what had afforded us the time and inspiration to build such a structure.

With no-one allowed to visit, it didn’t matter that it spanned a good three-by-four metre section of the lounge room floor or how long it stayed out for.

I hated lockdowns.

I was restless and lonely, angry about forced vaccinations, frustrated by my children’s reluctance to learn remotely, exasperated with the battle of encouraging them to each day while I also tried to work from home, and I missed my friends and family like crazy.

The noise in the house and inside my head grew increasingly louder and harder to handle as the days of isolation mounted up.

I know some might call that dramatic, but some of us struggled a lot in those dark days.

I still resent what was forced upon us all during that time.

But in the aftermath, the more distant it becomes, and coupled with the confronting realisation that my kids — well two out of three of them — are no longer interested in building forts, I find myself thankful for the experience, not what caused it.

Sure, it disrupted their education in a fairly detrimental way.

It halted their social skills and bred anxiety; it altered their will and motivation.

But being forced to stay inside our own four walls together for extended periods no doubt strengthened our family ties and gave us memories we’d not have made had we been going about our routine daily lives, week-on-week, year-on-year uninterrupted.

The memory of the box fort had me in a trance of deep reflection while I stood armed with a blade in my driveway.

I recalled the day during the pandemic that we started culling our wardrobes and toy boxes, before getting side-tracked gathering groups of things in similar colours.

We then dressed in, say, all green and grabbed all green props to hold before posing ourselves in front of a self-timed camera for the whackiest family photos you ever did see.

Then it was grey, then blue, and so on.

We still have those five canvas portraits up on the pool room wall.

They still make me giggle.

On a six-week-ordered lockdown, we chose six cakes out of the revamped Women’s Weekly Birthday Cakes book, wrote their names on slips of paper and put them in a jar.

Then, each one of the six weeks, we’d fish one out randomly and make that cake.

When I’d run out of ideas to convince my kids to do schoolwork on the third or fourth stint of remote learning, I made a giant rewards box with doors for each of the 30 days — much like an Christmas advent calendar — filled with goodies, such as $5 notes, Lego mini figures, chocolate bars and vouchers for takeaway dinners (each by three).

It cost me a small fortune, but it saved their learning from going altogether down the gurgler.

With life’s regular pace, I don’t think we’d ever have had a chance to do half the things we did during this time, yet I will never say I’m grateful for the pandemic out of respect for the people who didn’t make it through.

But without it, we probably wouldn’t have built the behemoth box fort that still lives rent free inside my head.

The crazy memory plasters a slightly deranged smile on my face as I stare blankly into space reminiscing in my driveway sometimes, knife in hand.

And, in those moments, my neighbours probably wish I was still locked down.

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Thursday, 11th November 2027

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