My Corona

I love my corona life. 

It's easy and lazy and stress free.  I am not caged with a half dozen other family members or teenagers, however, which makes a huge difference, on a confined life.  I am retired too, so still have living money, not awake nights over looming rent and car payment bills.

If I'm awake nights, it is to watch the stars through my window, or from my chair in the driveway. Why is it so quiet?   I thought with so many people home the collective city noises would increase.

It's as if every human now is on tiptoes and in whispers communicate, if at all.

But....yesterday our block defied social distancing, for just a moment in the incomprehensible vast mix of humanity and time.

An older woman from two blocks away was walking someone else's dog on our block when she fell, from the sidewalk to the street, hitting her elbow and other body parts.  The dog ran off, too.  I was only driving in, from feeding the boys, when I saw my neighbor with a bloodied woman and other neighbors searching the sidewalk for something.  I pulled over and jumped out to help.

The neighbor man walked her home.  Fortunately he said, she was not hurt so badly she couldn't hobble home, but she'd lost her stylus, for the phone, that had gone flying when she hit the street pavement. 

We all searched and searched for that tiny cheap item, like it was a wedding ring or piece of gold.  We wanted to find it for her to make things better, deliver it to her hand and by so doing, fix every little thing wrong in the world right now.  If we found that stylus, coronavirus was conquered!

We wanted connection so we searched too long for it, and chatted as we did.  The social distancing violators, besides myself, and the neighbor man walking the woman home, were the young couple from the end, with two of their kids, the older couple, two houses from me, telling stories, and the woman whose husband was walking the lady home.

The dog had skedattled straight home on his own after she fell.

The way things were.  I remember now.

When I drove to feed the boys in the late afternoon, racing a storm blowing in from the southwest that was turning the sky various shades of dark blue, the river, running as if nothing had happened to the world of humans, sparkled and shimmered under the sun over it and dark to its side.

I felt I'd never seen a river so beautiful before in my life.  It bubbled and frothed, lazed and meandered and thundered, as I drove the road beside it, oblivious to me and my kind, in no need of us, and at the same time, the electric of the storm was in my skin.

I meandered at the park, as thunder mumbled in the distance, and watched people there debate themselves, looking to the sky and then to the happy dog awaiting the next ball toss, or to their kids chasing one another across the white daisy smothered fields.  Nobody wanted to go back to their gilded cage, contrite, defeated, over a mere bit of rain.

The cat was annoyed.  He'd seen my car and where was I.  He eyed me from the brush then took his chance, coming out to show his hunger, make it personal.  He knew I would see.  He hid his eagerness for contact, the brush against the leg, the meet of the eyes in the brush, the words......those soft human syllables of joy.

This is our world and what we live for.