Day 107: What Will Happen?

Shelter in Place, San Francisco, California

July 2, 2020: What Will Happen?

This is our shed. We thought for a small minute about making it a studio, but it quickly became prime storage for a house that has neither basement nor attic, hiding out of sight all the things we might, someday, use or cannot part with yet. The shed sits in the shadow of a hideous, peach-colored four-story apartment building that rises from beyond our back fence. Unfortunately, it is the apartments we see from our house, not the shed. This week we’re watching two units on the second floor being gutted and restored after sitting vacant for at least six months. I wonder if the improvements will make them more desirable or - after the changes the pandemic is driving - prove a waste of time and money. Will there be a market for them by the time they’re done?

Rents have been sky-high for years now, and were still rising before the pandemic hit. It remains a mystery how anybody - much less a young working person of modest means - could afford a place of their own in this city. In fact, they don’t. Most get multiple roommates to share the costs of a market gone berserk or they move away and commute two hours to their jobs. And still there is a shortage. But will that be the case when the pandemic is over? Several large tech companies, include FaceBook, have announced that they will require/allow a large percentage of their employees to work from home permanently. They’ve learned, in the past three months, how to make it work. So that begs the question: if you can telework from anywhere, why would you pay $3-6000/month to rent a small place in San Francisco, when you can get a house (or two) without roommates for the same price someplace else? And what will the anticipated grand exodus of technology companies and workers do to the city’s housing market and to the rest of the businesses that stay behind? What happens when all the small businesses go belly up and more people lose their jobs? Already the SF Chronicle is reporting a record number of people abandoning their apartments and their leases either to scoop up suddenly falling rentals (down 10% already) elsewhere in the city or to move completely out of town.

Housing in San Francisco is wacky under the best of times, and everybody has different ways of coping with the mix of high property values and renters’ rights laws that make being a landlord challenging. Just within our backyard world we have a three-plex that has remained empty for twenty years (the owner’s choice, it seems), an illegal small mother-in-law apartment rented out to students, a tiny house divided by the landlord so that renters can sublet an even tinier first floor, and our own house which is legally a duplex, but which we occupy entirely ourselves. And that’s just the ones I know about. So listening this morning to the hammering and sawing going on beyond our shed and fence, I circle back around: how will the changing economic and workforce landscape affect our little world? What will happen to our city?

Day 106: In Harmony

Shelter in Place, San Francisco, California

July 1, 2020: In Harmony

I’ve found it very hard to photograph the small patch of lavender that has grown for years on the east side of the yard. It’s very hard to get the beauty of the cluster right when the individual stalks stand tall and far enough apart to thwart focus on the whole. But combining it with the Foxtail Fern that grows in a pot nearby and is similarly vertically inclined gives the lavender some stature and some context that make the stalks seem almost as pretty in the picture as they really are. (I believe the lavender is of the French or Spanish variety because it has a milder smell that does not make me sneeze; the fern reminds me always of coral reaching toward the surface of the sea.)

This morning I signed up to participate in an online ’sing-in’ of the Brahms German Requiem offered by the San Francisco Choral Society. I’m so excited. I hadn’t gotten up the courage to audition for the group before the pandemic, but it was on my list of things to do to get to know and enjoy the city better. Added bonus: I don't remember singing this work before. Now they’re offering a weekly series of rehearsals on Zoom. In the final performance we will sing along to the society’s recorded version from some years past. No audition, no pressure, we all will be on mute. Brilliant! I’ll go downstairs, put on my headphones and sing to my heart’s content! 

Besides my enthusiasm for the chance to sing, I find this exercise so emblematic of the times - a clever use of emerging technologies to keep us connected and in tune, a way for the organization to pivot quickly to keep themselves financially afloat and, ultimately, a sad commentary of the muzzled lives we’re forced right now to lead. But that’s OK. For now, I’m happy to sing online. I may not meet my fellow choristers, but It's better than singing alone.

Day 105: The Mysteries of Life

Shelter in Place, San Francisco, California

Bougainvillea is a wild, rambunctious vine that dominates a garden once it blooms. I love the two we planted side by side. They’re the perfect backdrop against our neighbor’s yellow wall, though several mysteries remain unanswered: 1) why do ours lose their leaves in winter when I see other Bougainvillea in the neighborhood keep their color year-round? The thorny vine is a bit of an eyesore without its leaves; 2) Why does one of our vines bloom six week later than the other, when they’re growing within two feet of each other and were planted the same day? and 3) most mysterious and existential of all - how does such a wild display of color have, actually, such tiny flowers you could be excused for not noticing? The bougainvillea flower, in fact, is the little, dainty white spot inside an ebullient nest of red leaves and stems - a quiet mystery amidst the noise (the colorful diagram of a COVID cell, by the way, reminds me a lot of our bougainvillea photographed like this, up close).

There is little mystery in our quotidian lives as our quarantine continues: Wake up, read the news, do a puzzle, plan dinner, then get out of bed for coffee and toast; grab the camera, visit the garden, sit in the sun and write, read more news online, scrounge a lunch, walk or read a book or stare at the jigsaw, write get-out-the-vote postcards, call a friend; then as evening descends, watch the news, cook dinner and enjoy it, settle down for one of a long rotation of TV series we have going on a list, check the news (again) online, and head for bed to read or sleep. Little changes as the days go by. 

Yet the whole reason we are here remains shrouded in mystery: How much do we even know about this virus we are studiously avoiding? How can we be sure that what we’re doing (and not) will keep us safe? What is going to happen next? So much is out of our control, so many questions remain unanswered, that it gets harder to avoid the most existential one of all - how much time do we have left? Death’s mystery, of course - the when and how of it - lurks somewhere in the shadows throughout our lives and some of us have brushed close enough already to be able to name the specter’s shape. But in these days where suspended lives and non-stop crisis have strangely melded to make us feel we’ve lost control, that question - the mystery of life and death - has become closer of late, a quiet companion in our nearly quiet room.