We’re at the start of a beautiful, three-day holiday Easter weekend and more than three months after, painfully, we’re still under the threat of Covid-19.

With Corona mitigation still in place, it means we have to stay put as much as we can, work from home and not leave the house for days even weeks at a time. While I loved the thought of foregoing my repetitive morning routines and daily commute, relishing the idea I was saving the planet in my own little way, the relative seclusion these last four weeks is taking a mental toll and the need to go out  stronger with each passing Spring day. While we’re free to wander around so long as social distancing is practiced, a couple of trips to the garden center and a road trip to an empty forest in Drenthe aside, we haven’t been to anywhere notable since an excursion to medieval Germany in early March, and after assurances from Teko that we’d go to someplace quiet – meaning few people – we were off to revisit his childhood down in South Holland. It’s mental health day in the time of Corona.

It was sunny and gorgeous in Hellevoetsluis, the quick picnic by the harbor followed by a stroll to the medieval center and through WW2-era bunkers was a welcome change, refreshing for the soul, and far removed from my usual disposition – plopped on a living room lounge chair. As scary and unpredictable lockdown is in the Netherlands, it‘s a relief we found ourselves here – a country where everything appears to work, things are kept running, people leave you alone and are generally adult about most things, in sharp contrast with what I’ve been seeing repeatedly in the news. In as much as the end of this new normal we’re living in is a mystery, it’s a relief that we’re still in good hands at least for the foreseeable future.