Day #19

Here's what's going for us in the back yard right now--spring. Only once a year are we blessed with the gift of emerging life. These little guys will flower soon and then be gone, but for a week or so in late March they're numero uno, a religious spectacle, a processional of bright green thanksgiving.

Lord knows we need 'em. Last weekend, Dr. Fauci dropped a number into the virus dialogue that may take a week or more to register--200,000 deaths, at a minimum, if we're blessed. Just for record, a reader tells me that total annual deaths from influenza average between 20 and 60 thousand.

COVID-19 is a wholly different breed of cat, and 200,000 is a trial simply to imagine. 

Impossible for us, a retired couple but not institution-ed. Like everyone else these days, we video-called (FaceTime) our kids just a dozen miles away. "Can we come over?" our granddaughter asked.  She's in college, except she isn't right now. A soft answer turneth away wrath, I guess, but how do you say, "No, you can't" sweetly? Her brother, a high school kid, told his mother he was jumping from the roof tomorrow. Stay tuned. 

For some, like us, life goes on. 

We went a dozen miles south for a river walk (wonderful, but nothing like San Antonio). We'll do that again because the path was, for us at least, new and as beautiful as the sunny morning. I grew up with hardwoods on the lakeshore, but out here at the edge of the plains, I've been really taken by cottonwoods, not because they're gorgeous but because--forgive me!--they're not. Look at this car wreck.

He's a monster. But then, who knows how many floods he's seen? How much wind? How many twisters? He's as formidable as he is mangled. Maybe it's a her. Wood so soft that most farmers out here on the ocean of grass called 'em weeds. Still, in no time at all this beast will draw a quilt of emerald over most of its nakedness. 

Call 'em what you want, I call 'em survivors--huge survivors whose towering ugliness is somehow astonishing.

Beating COVID-19 is going to require a level of American exceptionalism we haven't needed for many years. . .long riverwalks of patience and compassion and sorrow. 

In just a couple of weeks, if that, this old cronie will blossom, God willing. Come July heat, it's old, broken arms will spread soft shade over the river walk. 

That's something to look forward to too.