Day #48--Sheltered in Place

This morning's dawn

We're a long way from total blanket of emerald, but May is coming on strong. Leaves are opening, grasses rising from yellow detritus of a year gone by. Life is coming back, and what's outside our doors begs to entertain.

Even if you're no believer at all, yesterday, Sunday, was a Sabbath: mid-seventies, moderate sun, mostly windless, a gorgeous day. By early afternoon, even couch potatoes would have felt like shackled prisoners. So we risked the pestilence by having a picnic with our kids out at a farm pond--lawn chairs, eats, and fishing poles, six feet on all sides. It was a sabbath all right. Only if the fish were biting could it have been any more heavenly.

Didn't think much about it, either. Neither did the others out there--picnickers and fisherman, maybe a dozen or so. Didn't think much about it until late afternoon when our son and family lit up the computer screen, and we fell in love again with the newest littln' who's now just about a month old. The only palpable suffering we undergo in the epidemic is not going to Oklahoma to meet our darling new granddaughter. 

We're wary. We're early 70s, some health issues. The virus appears to enjoy taking up residence in people like us.

My back hurts this morning, but I'll almost certainly spend a couple hours out back, still cleaning up where last year's zombie growth gets in the way of what we hope is to come. Right now, the dawn couldn't be richer with color. Here at 103 Andrews Court, it's actually hard to feel under siege. We're doing well. In comparison to thousands of American families, we have no trouble smiling.

Here, if you stop to think about the damned pestilence, you try not to. It's not particularly difficult to think of it as something horrible that happens to people somewhere else because, largely, that's true. Not only that, the victims are not, you know, like me. Eight more cases in the county over the weekend, but only the victims know who, and likely as not, you think, at least some of them are from the packing company--you know, people the company busses in to work the lines--people with unpronounceable names.

Racists, us? No way.

Huge packing plants have been breeding grounds, and we're surrounded here--Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Worthington, Minnesota; Spirit Lake, Iowa; Sioux City, Iowa; South Sioux City, NE. All have staggeringly numbers. Sioux City--752 cases as of five hours ago.

Covid-19 is, literally, all around us, just not with us.

Yet. 

And it may never be. 

Another beautiful dawn, sky aflame.

"Red at night," my dad used to say, "--sailor's delight; red in the morning--sailor's take warning."

That's where we live today, sheltered in place.