200831 Summer's End Just Breathe

 august 31

John Prine: Summer's End   https://youtu.be/nXbEFTv9zr0

Leaves drift along the curb, August 30.

Summer's end is in the cool September air and the blue-and-white sky, going to bed with the window open, pulling up the bed sheet for the first time since June. 

Two sides of summer this year: nature's summer of burgeoning trees and gardens, flowers alive with bright colour, birds full of song. The  psycho baby squirrels leaping and jumping and chasing, scornful and dismissive, easily evade the juvenile hawks learning to hunt among the trees. And fruit and vegetables fresh from farms have come to our supermarkets. To our summer city where nothing else is the same.

For Torontonians, and all of humanity, the summer of 2020 was a sci-fi sequel to The Pandemic Spring, by Covid-19, ghost-written by Stephen King (fear and death) and Isaac Asimov (technology and a fictional future). The celebration of picnics and backyard barbecues, the usual summer joys, cold beer and sandy towels and laughing, (lots of laughing), never got off the ground.

The ringing of the bell: the first day of school, usually a parade of new clothes, old friends, a brave new start with a brand new pencil case, this year is under a cloud of grey fear, covered faces, a dark sky of covid-19: trepidation mounting the school bus steps.

The 2019-2020 school year never ended, it was off the table in March, summarily closed: an unprecedented occurrence since, well, ever. So there was no end-of-June "school's out" exuberance, no children set free into the hot streets for eternal summer. Our own little dead-end showed a slow coming-out, as children ventured into the sunshine by ones and twos to play and there might have been, at times, three or four scooters practicing jumps on the sidewalk ramps. Bikes, too, were allowed, but ball sports and sharing popsicles were still restricted to siblings. Never once did we drive to a country market for fresh corn, nor to Niagara for peaches and magic. The children missed splashpads and swings, skipping ropes, wading in the creek, the CNE (!) and the promise of one last three-day weekend, when anything might happen!

What do they think of it all? Ring-around-the-rosie, but don't hold hands. London Bridge is falling down. How much do they understand? How much do we, as grownups, understand about our responses to covid-19. Our collective ignorance of the virus, its psychological effect as a disease, and as social disruptor, and the economic and political destruction it has engendered, are overwhelming, (a farcical understatement).

We have been in this "time-still" waiting-place for almost six months. [Today is covid day 174] Waiting for normal to return is a mental go-to, but we know that there is no going back. And I am tired, (and yet I am sure that I have had an easier time than many), tired of being careful and afraid, of the logistics of a locked-down household, of setting out into the community like a survivor in a Triffid apocalypse, eyes blind to an enemy microscopic and fierce.*

The United States of America, once our sometimes-annoying neighbour, is today a virtual war-zone of political and social break-down and its people betrayed. Canada watches in disbelief, in horror, as it falls in ruins. There's more: Lebanon, Hong Kong, tyrants, internment camps, floods and hurricanes, the burning lands - winter is coming and we have few provisions for such a future as this.

Tomorrow begins a new month. Breathe. "...get out of bed every morning ... breathe in and out all day long. Then after a while [we may not need to remind ourselves] to get out of bed every morning and breathe."**

Keep safe.

*The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham, Michael Joseph, publisher, 1951

** Sleepless in Seattle, Tristar Pictures, 1993, Sam: "I'm gonna get out of bed every morning... breathe in and out all day long. Then after a while I won't have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out."

https://youtu.be/bausG809hv0    Willie and Lukas Nelson, performing "Just Breathe".