Very strange summer and now a fearsome fall
Time to jump? Fall foliage at Lake Willoughby, in Vermont
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
As we slip into the mellow season (except for politics), and we start to crunch dry brown fallen leaves on the sidewalks, I’ve been thinking about how we lived during this pandemic summer.
Yes, it was sometimes claustrophobic and included far too many repetitive activities (recalling the movie Ground Hog Day) but the warm weather made it easier to spend a lot of time outside, when it wasn’t too warm. It was also easier because there’s been little rain, which is mostly bad: We’re in a severe enough drought that woodland fire warnings were posted last week for southern New England. (You start to unduly worry about global warming and something like the West Coast fire catastrophe happening here. The lawns have looked as if desertification is getting started.)
Thank God that the pandemic didn’t start last November, at the start of our mostly indoors season.
Many of us fortunate enough to have a porch or backyard have found seeing friends there very pleasant, and safe enough to please most worrywarts about COVID-19. That’s not to say that social distancing and marks don’t make it harder to understand each other. I wonder if hearing-aid sales have surged since last winter. I hear a lot of shouting, including my own.
Meanwhile, we walk, walk, walk and wear out our dogs.
As for dining out at restaurants, we’ve done it inside and out. I prefer inside to avoid the street noise, car fumes, yellow jackets, jackhammers, leaf blowers, sidewalk lunatics and other distractions. Ignore the theatrics of “deep cleaning.’’ The chances of getting COVID from touching something are remote. It’s an air problem! Does the restaurant has a good HVAC system? Can all its windows be opened wide? Of course, some people won’t go to any public places. How long will they keep that up? I confess I’m not much of a COVID alarmist and do have claustrophobe tendencies. But often when I suggest meeting people at a restaurant or coffee shop the response is an anxious “no, not yet.’’
It’s been tougher than we had expected early this summer to travel even within New England because of testing rules, with frequent delays in getting results, and the 14-day quarantine orders. Maine is particularly draconian – very heavy fines. Still, after adjusting to that challenge, consider that there’s lots to see in our compact region, a relief for those for whom the pandemic makes traveling further afield impossible. Consider that maps show that Americans aren’t welcome in most of the world now, including – how embarrassing! – Canada. Close to home, the likes of the Maine Coast and the Green Mountains are well worth the aggravation of a test. However, that COVID has closed many roadside attractions (my favorite are old-fashioned diners for breakfasts) is dispiriting.
This is an anxious time in America: A vicious pandemic that has killed almost 200,000 and clipped everyone else’s wings, a deep recession, a mobster/treasonous president and his sycophant enablers, the expansion of dictatorship around the world and scary symptoms of man-made global warming, of which the West Coast fires and the population explosion of tropical storms are just current examples.
(Speaking of Trump’s enablers, read about Michael Caputo, the Looter in Chief’s propaganda minister and re-election-campaign manager at the Department of Health and Human Services:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/09/15/michael-caputo-election-violence-conspiracy-theories/5802225002/
He’s a fitting representative of the Trump regime.)
Whatever, it’s a beautiful time of the year hereabouts – mild, still verdant (where watered) and increasingly colorful until that first heavy frost silences the cicadas and crickets for good. Let’s wander outdoors as much as we can. In the long run we’re all dead.
The late Hartford-based poet and insurance executive Wallace Stevens wrote: “The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.’’
'Inhaled in one smell'
View of the Boston skyline from Belmont.
“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.”
-- Rainer Maria Rilke, in "Letters on Cezanne''