The beginning of September brought a return to summer heat, and everything is dry, dry. A handful of flowers remain to draw for Sweet B’s postcard project, crocosmia, tall purple salvia, tiny cyclamen. The lower leaves of sweet peas grow crinkly and pale, but a few stragglers still bloom up top. The old, indomitable rose bushes put forth a second flush of blossom after a mid-summer pruning. So many orange orbs of pumpkins show through huge and tattered leaves – nearing their allotted 110 days. Maple leaves begin to fall.
The solar twinkle lights shine and only a glimmer of light shows in the sky, when I take my seat by the window in the morning. And with the light, neighborhood birds appear – the tiny house wren who’s been near the patio all summer, often startled when we walk through the rosemary into her space, juncos, and lately a blue jay. Hummingbirds check out the last flowers and dip and dart into the little fountain. All summer I’ve heard mourning doves, watched them visit the birdbath, then fly high to the top of a huge fir tree. Their cry sounds like somewhere else or something sad.
The other day I walked through town to drop a package at the Post Office. Every other conversation I passed contained the word COVID, “if it weren’t for COVID,” we could do this or that. Masked tourists and locals queue by the ice cream shop, and masks cradle chins of people eating at outdoor tables, separated under umbrellas in the middle of town.
Winter is coming to this COVID year. Light bulbs reveal they are burned out, like light bulbs always do in the fall, but no gaggles of backpacked kids walk by our street. We’ll be more indoors, with flu and darkness. In my head I try to turn it around, what if we kept our masks on and didn’t get the flu, didn’t make each other sick with colds?
What if we settled in to enjoy all that’s newly on the screen? The brochure for the Seattle Arts and Lectures series came, and all lectures (including Maira Kalman and Tana French) will be available online. We missed Lord B’s birthday, but could watch our older son’s Zoom trial – with participants in different towns, even different states. My husband’s university classes are online – no long trek by ferry, train, and foot to the campus.
But I don’t think I can make it work – not with all the misery the government seems too broken or heartless to address, not with people dying, little businesses folding, civil unrest, and the threat of retaining the unspeakably bad president, with his political vaccine and cruel words and actions.
Oh, no way to end a post. What about bulbs – those hopeful packages – can we plant them now and picture a better time in the spring?
her spirits rose... 
That God for the bulbs and promise of spring flowers! We might dump Trump and have other reasons for a happy spring.
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Oh yes dump Trump for starters – end COVID- tackle climate change – our hopeful list is long!
Hope keeps me going. Don’t lose it!!
Agreed!
The doves always sound to me like Hawaii in the early morning. And bulbs are surely a hopeful thing. But it all does seem impossible and overwhelming. On a different note, our grandson calls blackberries “Covid berries,” because the kids have been warned not to pick them off the vines near the sidewalk because they might get Covid. Oh, I will be glad when and if things can get back to at least semi-normal. Thanks for your cheerful orange crocosmia painting! Art helps.
Oh that seems a stretch about the berries! But they’d no doubt get ash in their mouths from our other catastrophe.
Yes doves – Hawai’i for sure – specially on a warm morning.
Yes, indeed– the paradoxes of this time–the intense little pleasures and the looming huge realities.