A Spring Break

     A week ago, while listening to a book on FaceTime, Lord B told me that, in Alaska, “it’s not spring, but it’s spring break.” Snow still covers the ski mountain – making for great ski days without school.

     Here it is spring – just days past the vernal equinox, blossoms cover cherry and plum trees, flowering daphne perfumes the air, anemone and a few cautious tulips join daffodils, whose insistent yellow declares the season begun. On my morning walk, a pair of small dinosaur hatchlings suddenly appeared at the end of a driveway – made of plastic and wearing masks, of course.

     Resident birds noisily busy themselves, and V-shaped flocks of geese touch down on Eagle Harbor, then depart for northern climes. Unseen for months, rabbits appear from thickets to nibble fresh green grass. And in the human world, the garden center seems relaxed compared to this time last year, when a desperate air permeated the place – gone are many of the restrictions and plants are plentiful.

     It’s a good time for a short spring break in “Her spirits rose….”

Crowds

     After being a click ‘n shipper for a year, last week I actually visited the post office. Bainbridge sports two post offices, one tiny and the other small. Just one person at a time may enter the tiny post office. But a line forms at the other – six customers and two workers in a small room, sort of spaced out, not really a crowd – but being there made me antsy.

     And made me think about crowds, about how they used to be associated with exciting things: travel, performances, big cities, the Women’s March. How readily we accepted being close to an unknown person – and how long ago that seems.

     And now I wonder what it will be like as things open up, will we ever again be comfortable with crowds? Will we come to a point where crowded moments – the cluster that forms as people wait to disembark the ferry, an airport waiting area, the aisle of a movie theatre after the show, the crush of a rattling, stuffy subway car! – will be normal again?

     What do you most look forward to in our future? I love the very thought of a hug (or maybe a crowded hug) with grandchildren and their parents. Increasing acceptance of public crowds will mark a milestone in our COVID-19 journey – this one toward joy! 

“Hamnet”

     Because I began and continued to read Maggie O’Farrell’s new book, “Hamnet,” in bed for several nights in that liminal space between awake and sleep, I utterly failed to appreciate what a wonder it is. But I woke up to its pleasures about a third of the way in, and the next day began to devour it properly. I have loved Maggie O’Farrell’s books and now also this one – for her language and the scope of her imagining.

Despite the title, the crucial, central character in the book is Agnes, the name O’Farrell gives Anne Hathaway, William Shakespeare’s wife. She’s a healer and herbalist, an outsider, a woman who at 26, married the 18-year-old Latin tutor, destined to become playwright to the centuries. The tale alternates between the book’s present time, when Hamnet, their only son, is 11 with the time of Agnes’s youth – beloved mother and wicked stepmother, meeting her husband, and the birth of their three children.

Replete with Shakespearean themes of death, grief, the supernatural, twins, mistaken identity and the natural world, O’Farrell wholly imagines the life of the family Shakespeare left behind (paying only infrequent visits) as he found his way in London. O’Farrell uses the everyday details of forests (hazelnuts are “dust-jacketed pearls”) and kitchens, herbs (“extract of valerian and tincture of chickweed) and animals, childbirth, in-laws, and houses.

And she writes specifically of tragedy, for Hamnet is felled by an unnamed pestilence, most probably bubonic plague. (O’Farrell’s rich recreation of the infection’s journey, via generations of fleas who voyage the world, is harrowing during our plague.) Hamnet’s death brings an unbearable grief to Agnes.

     In the end, Agnes’s countryside and the playwright’s teeming London town collide – and also the griefs of mother and father – in the crowded pit of the Globe Theatre, during a production of “Hamlet,” four years after the death of Hamnet.

     It’s a marvel of a book – worthy of a wideawake reading.

 

A Year On

     On the third of March last year, I first mentioned the coronavirus on the blog, wondering about its spread. Then gradually, with no real uh-oh moment, we learned new words and phrases: fomite, flatten the curve, shelter in place, social distancing, super spreader. It shocked when Italy shut down, but by mid-month Washington followed suit. Masks quickly became standard, as did virtual work, school, and social life. Hugging went the way of touching our faces.

     But at no point early did I imagine that a year later COVID-19 would have killed upwards of 500,000 Americans. Now we can answer the questions posed as the year wore on: Will the winter of 2020 be better? Or the darkest winter we’ve ever known?

     I just mark this anniversary, and for a moment think about then and now. It’s discouraging to face how badly the past administration did, but heartening to watch the new one attempt to set things right. At first vaccines seemed a matter of years in the future – and now everyone is scrambling to get one of three approved vaccines. (Speedy vaccine development made possible by scientific breakthroughs, and by the appalling amount of virus circulating in the country.)

     And I try to appreciate that vaccine miracle as we negotiate the new uncertainties. We’ve grown familiar and comfortable with masks and distance, and I try not to think about the variants with their uncatchy number names. But nothing seems certain anymore. And we are a little numbed I think, very accustomed to Zoom life with family and friends, maybe a little nervous to actually be with them. With two shots aboard, my friend of longstanding visited hers, and commented, “it’s real life in an unknown time.”

     I loved reading about happiness at vaccination centers. Surely the coming spring and summer will bring an easing of anxiety and return of trust – an end to this COVID year’s dearth of joy.