Joy of the Day, Day 55: Outdoor Spaces

It has been a while since I’ve mentioned anything about silver linings, but a new one revealed itself today: our backyard.

I’ve mentioned more than once that we’ve done a lot of work to our home over the years—there are very few square inches inside our house that haven’t been tweaked or repainted, at the very least, or redesigned or reconstructed, at the very most. In the course of all that work, we tried to think ahead, and did create some beautiful outdoor spaces, imagining all the ways we would one day live our lives outside during the beautiful, dry, PNW summers.

We had the right idea and for a while, every so often, we would use the spaces we built as we had intended. But as the story often goes, life happened. Our family, but especially our kids, got older, busier, and less inclined to stick around on weekends; we kept forgetting to use the fire pit.

During our last few days in La Quinta, our kids began to think and talk about their hopes and dreams for summer—a summer that will look very different from the one any of us were expecting. The promise and potential of a summer at home, all of us, together, with nothing to lure us away, sparked a new conversation about all the fun things we could do to start making good use of our backyard. Let’s build a hot tub. Let’s hang lights along the fences, and in the trees around the patio. Let’s add more chairs around the fire pit and stock the fridge and fire up the barbecue. Let’s have tiki torches. Let’s be together—outside.

Today, the beautiful spaces in our own backyard are my joy. #joyinplace