We escaped the terrible cold of Texas and the mid-west this time. It almost reached 50 yesterday, the brief sun come from exile to make the upturned face warm. Another storm is coming Thursday, but the slant of light has become obvious, a Spring slant, a rising of its arc and corresponding shift in its quality, a softening. Cardinals and song sparrows have begun to sing some mornings. It is never too early to stake a hold on territory.
Every person I know is tired of this long Covid withdrawal from others, dreams of a return to reading faces without masks, and knows now how much they feel the loss of faces, and the loss of looking at a friend’s face over a shared meal prepared by someone paid to do so. Every person I know is ready to go back to the movies, to a ballgame, to a concert, to a play, to joining others on crowded streets free from the anxiety of strolling in the slipstream of the virus and imagining it like the ingested spores in 100 horror movies immediately beginning to warp their transformation on the molecular level. To that fear of sickness, add isolation and loneliness and holding in place the human urge to connect and throw in zoom-fatigue: we wish for an end to it all. Everyone I know is looking to the Spring to signal the breakout.
Until then, we make do with books and movies, with work if we are fortunate enough, even more so if work means actual human beings entering our domains, with emails and texts and phone calls, with shivering conversations on streets and along trails, with photographs — Here I am, Here is the world right now, Send word, I give you joy, Hold fast.
