June 1, 2020: Be Careful What You Wish For
Shelter in Place, San Francisco, California
I’d always been told that if you trim dead blossoms from a lilac tree it would cease to bloom, but after reading info to the contrary last year, I cut off every dead bunch that I could reach, and this year we had a bumper crop of flowers. New, young branches, too. Now, I’ve been looking at all those dead blossoms and wishing that my bum legs were good enough to do what I did last year. So I’m sort of grateful that this squirrel is finally going put himself to good use, lifting his fat, slick self up into the lilac tree to chew away on the dried-up blossoms. Squirrels are not so ubiquitous here as they are some places I’ve lived. We have only one permanent rodent resident, the same one (we assume) for years. For a time, he seemed to have a mate, but for whatever reason, we’re back to a single squirrelly visitor who does more harm than good. He digs up my bulbs, hollows out big holes in my geranium pots for no apparent reason, chews off fern sprouts and puts his teeth marks on our pears, knocks sugar water out of the hummingbird feeder so he can lap it up, and generally prances around like we owe him gratitude for monitoring our space. I don’t know whether letting the darn thing get fat on our lilacs is worth the devil’s bargain.
For weeks now, we’ve been overwhelmed with pandemic news no matter where we look - television, online, conversations with family. It’s been as if everything else in our personal lives - and in our country and the world, for that matter - has been taken off the table, the slate wiped clean. Covid conversations for breakfast, lunch and dinner, Covid headlines in-between. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” John and I have mused of late, “if there was something else covered in the news for once? When will we think about anything else?”
Be careful what you wish for.
This weekend, we forgot for a minute that there was a deadly virus in our midst as we, like everybody else, stayed glued to the television late into the night, watching the anguish of our Black neighbors, worrying as we watched familiar landmarks burn. Covid-19 was relegated to a back page, literally, in the news. Undoubtedly, as the fires are at least temporarily extinguished, we will return to our personal obsession with keeping the virus from our door. And the news, once again, will switch back from one un-seeable, apocalyptic tragedy to the other - from systemic racism and privilege back to the pandemic threat - especially since there will undoubtedly be more Covid-19 cases in a few weeks as so many people let down their guard on the beaches and in the streets.
Maybe the election will finally push both tragedies off of the front page…. but then again, we should be careful what we wish for.