Every Good Morning

Especially now, I remember that I am an animal and have spent all my life with others of the species.

At the Pet Food store, some of the employees are under stress. Yesterday a customer came up and stood within a foot of another in line, was asked to please step back and instead went into a cursing tirade about “her rights” and the “fing stupidity of all this standing away s.”

The woman I spoke to said this was the exception. Most customers have been reasonable.

The supermarket has taped lines and boxes on the floor to indicate spacing and one way directions for carts. The masked woman wiping down each cart said her husband was sick but she had to work.The woman directing full carts to open registers said she goes home each night praying that she will be safe. More people than I have ever seen are showing an awareness of their bodies in space. Most stop, hesitate, give way, say thank you, smile above their masks, show courtesy.

Exceptions attract the attention. Two men in their 40’s, unmasked, ungloved, and based on their remarks, strangers until moments before, stand within a forearm’s distance and loudly laugh and talk and spray each other with … well, who knows?

I imagine the air around them turning orange.

A virus is galactic light distances beyond tiny: “David R. Wessner, a professor of biology at Davidson College, has shown that the polio virus, 30 nm across, is about 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt.”

A virus is not alive. It cannot reproduce. It replicates. It must have a host. The host is alive. The virus makes copies of itself within the host. Take away the host, the virus dies. Outside the body it can survive for only a short time. “Viruses are the most common biological entities on Earth.”

We are being sickened and killed by ‘entities’.

Viruses make ingenious adaptations. They can move from host to host. For example, the Coronavirus disperses in droplets, in the aftermath of a sneeze or cough. Inhale it, let it penetrate your nose or eyes, touch a surface recently colonized (the colonies always die) and transport the virus to your mucus membrane and you may contract it, but not everyone does because of factors as yet unknown or because his or her immune system fights it off successfully.  Women apparently fight it off better than men. No one knows why. However, those who carry it without becoming sick, the asymptomatic, can be agents of the virus, hosts who walk among us scattering its seeds.

Viruses are as ancient as life itself. They are older than the seasons, older than Spring.

We are nature and are immersed in nature, more so if we choose to walk outside.

On Sunday I saw the first swallow of the season. It was investigating the cracks between the stones in the ruin of an old iron furnace, perhaps for a nesting site. On that same walk, we topped a rise and startled a fox, wonderfully thick coated in dark ginger and auburn. It stared at us, my silent dogs staring back, some canine recognition  being exchanged, before it glided into brush and disappeared as if it had entered another dimension.

Skunk cabbage is up. The red maples are opening their red blossoms at their crowns. There are bees everywhere there are blossoms. Bird song seems to increase in volume and species each morning.

There is beauty everywhere, and it is utterly indifferent to us, as is the Virus. We are slick and moist repositories. That’s all. The natural beauty we see and hear has purposes that have nothing to do with our aesthetic sensibilities.

As it has always been, it is up to us to make meaning. Maybe one effect that might emerge from the Coronavirus is a renewal of an understanding: that we are woven into nature. We are inseparable. Our atomized, arrogant, Olympian individualism is an artifact, a lie we have told ourselves. We have built civilizations upon that lie. Maybe we might begin to imagine another way of living or at least other ways of acknowledging the seamless reality of all life.

Probably not.

Meanwhile, wherever you are, please treat with great kindness and respect all those grocery store clerks, warehouse workers, truck drivers, dentists and oral surgeons who take on emergencies, farmers, teachers and cops, nurses and doctors, caretakers in old age homes, health care men and women, delivery drivers. You know who I’m talking about. Anyone with whom you deal who earns part of his or her wage from tips, please give generously.

If ever there was a time to be thankful for those ‘essential workers’, the ones who really make the country run, now is that time.