LA PRIMAVERA

LA PRIMAVERA CORONA 2020

Snowdrops have been out for several weeks and are almost finished.  The yard is carpeted in the little blue flowers whose name I’ve never learned.  A young woodchuck is wandering the neighborhood at dawn and twilight and sometimes in broad daylight. The first I’ve ever seen on this street and I have no explanation for his invasion.  He seems to be solo, no family attached.

I clipped forsithea branches in mid-February to force them and brighten my home, but now the shrubs themselves have burst into a sea of brilliant yellow on their own. The cherry tree outside the kitchen has buds that are holding back but visibly ready to burst on the first warm day. The begonias in my living room that sport beautiful large leaves all winter have sent up their slender spikes with the delicate pink blossoms.

A few weeks ago an ambitious and optimistic pair of house sparrows began to construct a nest in the birdfeeder outside my kitchen window that my son built some 40 years ago.  A wood panel divides the feeder into two parts, the panel presumably intended simply to support the roof, not to create two separate zones.  In past years there have been attempts at nests that I either scuttled on a daily basis or watched for a week or two and then when nothing happened, carefully removed.

This year of the virus I’m providing positive encouragement and support.  I only put seed in the left section so that the only birds now approaching the right section are the two sparrows, and they are still hard at work bringing new leaves, bits of forsithea, whatever flotsam and jetsam catches their attention.  And they sit there quite possessively, stepping next door into the food zone from time to time and then resuming their watch.  So will they ever risk putting a few eggs into that clumsily constructed nest?  Perhaps.  If yes, I’ll report it on Facebook where all daily news trivial and profound now circulates. It’s therapeutic to watch those birds constructing their nest as though there was nothing amiss with the larger world.

My neighbor and I sat out in the sun two days ago with a wall sheltering us from the wind, a sun that was very warm and welcoming.  The Sound was flat, calm, so inviting that I almost took out my kayak, although the day before it was tossing and pounding the beach with rain sheeting down and penetrating my porch roof.  Today again there are clouds overhead and white-capped waves on the Sound suggesting that warm sunshine was an illusion.

We need illusions of calm, of warmth, of sanity, of safety in a world gone mad.  This dead end street provides an oasis of sheltered nature and the empty sea beyond where I and my neighbors have no risk from the virus or from bumping up against crowds so long as we stay home. Our street is quiet, only four houses, only a handful of people living in those four houses and careful not to interact except perhaps to run an errand, or to bake in one home and then share the bounty in a package carefully left outside the other doors.

It’s eerie. We aren’t accustomed to the silence or the solitude. The different screens in each of our homes with talking voices—phones, computers, TVs—project real danger, real fear, and all the more so as the voices contradict each other, some showing charts with the ever accelerating spike in positive cases worldwide but especially right now in New York, others still trying with total disregard for risking lives to deny those projections and to encourage business as usual.

It’s hard to think bucolic thoughts at a time like this.  It’s even harder not to fall prey to their opposite, to an obsession with what’s wrong or wrong-headed, and to wring one’s hands in despair.  I have friends admitting to indulging in far more alcohol than usual.  Others taking Xanax or other anti-depressants.  My own temptation would be the turtle-like withdrawal, head in shell and refusing to come out until it’s over, refusing to confront or combat the lies, the greed, the inhumanity on the part of some of our elected leaders. 

But that’s not an option. I have to recognize it, to confront it.  I have to listen to those leaders—the Cuomos and the Faucis--who are doing their best night and day to lead us through this, to maximize the lives saved, to mandate behaviors that will slow the spread, bend that wicked curve, bring us through what is a war quite as much as the wars we have fought with weaponry in the past.

This morning as I wait for Cuomo’s daily briefing—so careful he is to emphasize that what he is sharing are FACTS—I remember FDR’s talks during WWII; DeGaulle’s broadcasts from England into occupied France; Churchill’s stirring calls to arms.  I do my best to ignore that other petulant, erratic, self-centered voice that shouts daily lies from the highest podium in our country. If only there were a way to silence that voice, but as for myself, I simply don’t watch or listen.  Instead, I wait for Andrew Cuomo.

Beyond that, and beyond all the messages and sharings and virtual hugs and smiles on Facebook that take up more and more time every day, I bake for me and for neighbors.  Today or tomorrow I will prepare my son’s wonderful balsamic chicken dish and take it to some housebound friends, housebound before the virus.

I play my Steinway, an instrument with a long history in my family, purchased from a piano teacher (why did she part with it, I wonder?) before I was born, in Baltimore, so my four sisters could have lessons when they were growing up. It has been mine ever since I married. I try to play it almost every day.  Now in this crisis, I play Bach more than any other composer. 

I perform the daily rituals of my solitary life that would be important in a happier time: wind up the pendulum clock that I inherited from my grandparents’ home in Chicago; water those begonias, and hibiscus and avocadoes that fill the bay window in my living room all winter before they go out to summer in my yard; do laundry, dishes, wipe down the surfaces. Read, read, and read. Since March 10 when the virus here in New Rochelle made international headlines and stay-at-home became the mantra, I’ve read almost a dozen books and as many magazines.

Without this crisis my thoughts and efforts now in March and April would have been focused on promoting my new book that comes out on May 5, Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming.  I love that book and can shamelessly tout it because it’s the work of 21 women, not simply a book by me. I love the individual stories of how 20 very different women discovered an interest or a talent or a passion for one or another aspect of food, from growing it in a back yard garden or on a farm to preparing and serving it to the public in a fine restaurant.  At the same time their twenty stories tell the evolution of a region of our country, northwestern Michigan, over half a century.  Referred to in the past as a “culinary wasteland” it is recognized today as a veritable Eden where food is celebrated from the organically grown fruits and vegetables to the fine dining in acclaimed restaurants.  I’ll write more about that book and those women later in the spring, but wanted to mention it here in this blog.  Many/most of their enterprises are shuttered now, or working with take-out meals or products:  baked goods, cheese, chocolate. I hope for all of us that another month or two at most will see the apex of the virus behind us and that all of us can move on to recreate our normal lives.