August, COVID Summer
The other day, a friend called and asked if she could come over to my garden for a distanced outdoor chat. It would be our last chance to get together for a while, she explained: “We’re going to Vermont in two weeks. We start quarantining tomorrow.”
The lengths people will go to get out of Swarthmore in August.
Not me, though. I’m staying right here, grateful every day for my air conditioning, my backyard, my health, and my job.
People get hungry for a change of scene. It’s natural enough. But I wonder if they’re partly hoping to escape this new life we’re living, with its restrictions and fear and economic pain. With the looming return, for many families, to virtual school. Not to mention a fast approaching and critical election in which it will probably be difficult to vote.
I’ve heard that astronauts on the Space Station get stir-crazy about four months in.
Of course, there’s no escaping any of this. Not for a while. Not even in Vermont.
It’s hard not to feel that we are tilting quickly from disaster to calamity, with the August heat and the incessant whirr of the cicadas a fitting backdrop.
In Swarthmore, the COVID-19 numbers remain low, but in Delaware County at large they are rising. In Chester, just a few minutes down the road, they are rising fast. The biggest jump is among people in my children’s age group, 15-40. Socializing in large groups without masks is thought to be driving those numbers. I don’t see who or what is going to make that stop.
As we slog through this dark time, there are also moments of light: the cardinal in the tree, the child’s chalk drawing on the sidewalk, the sight of my neighbor — hospitalized for over a month with COVID-19 — walking swiftly around the block. The rare face-to-face talk with a friend, with six feet of grass between us.
I met another friend in the Philadelphia Navy Yard last week. It was the first time in months I’d crossed the city line. It was broiling hot, even in the shade. It was worth it, though.
When I got home, I emailed her: “So lovely to spend time with you! Even in the godawful heat. Or does discomfort in one realm emphasize pleasure in another realm?”
Laurie, who lived in Moscow in the 1980s, wrote back, “Your theory works for the USSR. My friends there in the bad ol’ days used to joke that only they knew how to experience joy; we were too spoiled. ‘There’s bread in the store. Pure joy!’”
Here in America, we get less spoiled every day.
