In one of my favorite fantasies, I'm old.

I'm sitting at my kitchen table, wrapped in a well-loved but somewhat ratty bathrobe, leisurely sipping coffee and taking bites of buttered toast slathered in cherry jam. Outside, the sun shines and birds chirp.

I flip through a fat newspaper, passing up all the stories that look too depressing or too long. I linger on book and movie reviews, then do the crossword puzzle in pen.

At no point in this reverie does anything remarkable happen.

What makes this mundane dream so relaxing, so marvelous, is what's not there.

There are no thoughts of work, children or home; my most important successes and biggest mistakes in those regards have concluded. I'm not worried about gaining weight or going gray because, on both fronts, the fight is over. I look like what I look like, and my accomplishments, or lack thereof, are what they are.

What a relief.

Now, before you start, I know aging isn't all coffee and crossword puzzles, and the elderly have plenty of troubles, but still, it won't be all bad, will it?

Catching COVID wasn't all bad, either.

After two years of successfully eluding it, the coronavirus finally, recently, caught me.

Or, more accurately, I caught it.

I'm vaccinated and boosted, and I was never in the highest-risk categories, so I wasn't terrified. And though it made me nervous, in some strange way, I was relieved.

The coughing, fever, body aches and chills were all profoundly unpleasant, and I'm sure my husband didn't feel much pleasure as he did all the cooking, cleaning and child care.

But as I lay in bed, I thought to myself how at least the days of feeling hunted, like a leopard trying to avoid the working end of Trump Jr.'s assault rifle, were over. There was no point in worrying about catching COVID anymore.

What would be, would be.

In the insistency of illness, I couldn't think about much more than how my body felt. I was tired but couldn't sleep, so I turned on TV shows that didn't demand much. I dozed to mysteries and reality shows. I drank and ate what I liked, which wasn't usually much, but there was no guilt in any of it.

It reminded me of being in the hospital, newly postpartum, when the hard work of pregnancy had concluded and the harder work of parenthood hadn't fully begun.

My mental state got worse, though, once I started to recover from COVID. Because then the worries crept in, and in my weakened physical state, it was harder to fight them.

What about the kids and school?

What to do about all that laundry?

But eventually I realized that I could still, in some ways, live in that place, that imaginary place where I was sick, or old, or recovering from childbirth.

I could live in the place where I didn't worry about when the sheets had last been changed. I could cut myself a break on how much TV the kids watched. I could lose weight another day.

It didn't have to be today. And, if I'm honest, with most of my fears and worries, it didn't have to be ever.

Because when the day comes that I'm actually old, actually sitting with my coffee, actually wearing that ratty bathrobe and actually looking at that sunshine, I don't anticipate regretting the early release of any fears.

What has been, has been. What will be, will be.

I imagine that I'll then think, only, about the marvelous and mundane right now.

And what a relief that will be.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

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