Looking back on the first coronavirus spring

Patricia Dubrava

Hope

This essay is cobbled from notes I wrote in the spring, the first season of our pandemic. A few appeared in earlier form on my blog, Holding the Light. Now winter is coming, our numbers are worse than they were in April and we are so tired of it all. In the spring, the predominant feeling of these notes was hopeful. I’m not sure I’d say the same now.

March 11, 2020. The Just Before Times. I walk without a jacket, sun warm on my back. Trees have begun to blush wine and copper at their tips, and early blooming crocuses push through layers of brown leaves, not caring that on Monday it will snow. This kiss of warmth is excuse enough for the kids. A chattering bevy of them loiter on Manual High’s steps in shorts, sundresses, loath to go inside. Down the street, women sit on porches, watch their toddlers tumble in the front yard, drunk with sunlight.

Stay Home Times. One early morning Judy texted, “look on your porch.” We found a bag with two sausage and egg sandwiches. Christine called over the fence: “going to the store tomorrow, give me a list,” brought half a tea bread she’d made. Jenny-Lynn texted on her way to the store, dropped OJ and eggs on our porch, backed away to chat. We had actual phone calls with family and friends, checking in. Amy, who I taught with years ago, who lives blocks away, texted, “Going to Soopers, need anything?” Dropping those groceries off, she exclaimed, “they had everything.” Novel American experiences: being excited that nothing we needed was out of stock, having friends who know we’re in a vulnerable age group, volunteer to shop for us.

They weren’t on our list, but because they were on closeout, Amy also brought us a bunch of pussy willows.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m touched and grateful for the neighbors who brought us groceries before we decided we could fend for ourselves. I’m just a little like, wow, so you’ve always thought of us as old, then?

Two weeks of staying home. The sky is limpid, the mountain view from my Denver neighborhood sparkling. A young adult track club is on the high school field, broad jumping, sprinting, timing each other. I pause to admire those gloriously muscled bodies. I don’t remember the last time the Front Range was so clear of haze in the afternoon, granite slabs shoved through high peak snow, angles of the Flatirons, the serration of tree lines. Is it because there are fewer cars are on the road? The background drone of traffic has hushed. As I walk on, half a block behind me, a woman and young daughter are walking too, singing “it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.”

Our nearest Safeway instituted senior-only shopping from 7 – 9 a.m. We reached the half-full parking lot at 6:50. Sunrise brushed a scattering of clouds bright pink against the bluing sky. It would be a sunny day. Seven elders stood in line, staying six feet apart, waiting patiently. By the time the doors opened, the line had lengthened behind us. Purnell Steen, our local jazz pianist, was there. Are you still playing? Phil asked. Oh, no, he said. Entertainment is shut down all over the world. No one’s playing anywhere.

Two clerks guarded a cart of TP, handed out one package per customer. The paper products aisle was empty. I couldn’t stop staring at it. It was good TP; we’d have to use it for our noses too. The frozen dinners section was also decimated. The baking aisle was a shock. No flour, except for three lonely one-pound bags. Wow, people are stress baking, I exclaimed. A nearby woman laughed. No eggs. Plenty of fresh meat and poultry. Plenty of veggies and fruit. People are baking cakes but not making dinner.

It had been two weeks since I’d left the house. This was my first experience of America under siege. How many of us had never seen empty grocery shelves? This is what people experienced during the Depression, a taste of what third world countries experience daily. After this will we appreciate what we’ve got here?

April. Easter in The After Times. Yesterday when it was still spring, not snowing like it is today, I passed a group of Whittier’s young white residents—I’m still adjusting to the neighborhood no longer being black—sitting on their steps in tank tops and shorts, maskless. I gave them wide berth. One asked another if she’d defended her dissertation yet. Yes, she replied, on March 6th. Oh, the questioner exclaimed, you were able to do it during real life.

May. I guess I’m growing out my hair now. I guess we all are. We’ll be post-pandemic hippies when we appear in public again. Don’t ever have to cut it; let it stop by itself.

I extend sympathy to those with children in the house at this time. Little ones can’t understand why they can’t play with their friends, why they can’t use the yellow-taped playground. On my daily walk a helmeted four-year-old flew past me on his tiny trike, making joyful revving motor noises all the way. Half a block behind him, a woman shouted, “wait for Nana at the corner!” As she overtook me, looking frazzled, she said, from a discreet distance, “when we were getting ready to go, he asked me how fast I could run.”

I also feel sad for extroverts, who are in withdrawal from crowds. I’ve shunned crowds for decades, but extroverts must be suffering. Being introverts and semi-retired, Phil and I follow our usual routines, after breakfast go to separate rooms to work on our projects, don’t speak for hours. I have blogs to write, translations to complete, an online class to teach, and need silence. Phil does antique book jacket restorations, an occasional graphic design project, listens to old radio shows as he works. Our lives are little different now than they were before.

Something strange just happened. A plane flew over.

It has occurred to me that we may never return to the gym. Our stairs have 16 steps. If I go up and down twelve times, that’s 384 steps. Also, it’s 30 paces from the back door to the front door. I can exercise here. But will I?

It was only a matter of time: someone somewhere in the world had twins today and named them Corona and Covid.

Triage. From the French, of course, French being especially adept at concise articulations of this kind. A system for assigning priorities of medical treatment to battlefield casualties on the basis of urgency or chance for survival. Triage is not a thing domestic hospitals and emergency workers are in the habit of invoking. They do no harm. And beyond doing no harm, they exercise every possible option to save life. How devastating it must be, with the ICU full, no ventilators left and ambulances lined up at the door, to have to decide: let this one go.

Sometimes my anger flares. Don’t tell me as many die of the flu, of cancer: they don’t die of flu and cancer all at once, hundreds and thousands in one day; they don’t infect those around them as they go, leaving us with inadequately protected medical staff who are literally dying to save us. Don’t tell me it’s Chinese: the majority of our infections have come through airports, from Europe, from spring break, from cruise ships—Americans coming home.

Sometimes sadness. I read aloud a portion of Queen Elizabeth’s speech to her people. Listen, I tell my husband, she’s using parallel construction, allusions to history and a song popular during the Blitz, references the Brits will all get, that will inspire and uplift—and I choke up, cannot continue. Words aimed at steeling resolve and providing hope: oh, for a leader who could do that for us now.

At the start of lockdown people read my blog posts immediately and wrote comments like never before. It reminds me of the Marjorie Gross essay “Cancer Becomes Me,” which I once made my students read: one of the pluses of having cancer, she wrote, was that people returned your phone calls right away. There are pluses to everything if you look at it properly.

June. Laughter, shouting and music drift into my open upstairs windows. Sundown after eight. Motorcycle rumble, that summer backbeat, sets off car alarms. After weeks of quiet, the low drone of traffic returns. Jogging, riding bikes, walking dogs, pushing strollers: the natives are restless, the numbers of the dead unreal, the enemy invisible.

A caravan stages at the school across the street, balloons blossoming from sunroofs, windows soaped to read “8th grade continuation,” surrounded by hearts and flowers. Several dozen SUVs line up, their drivers the kind of young you can still be with eighth grade children. Teachers and parents upbeat, chattering, not social distancing. About half in masks. They’ll reassemble each morning until they’ve driven past every student’s house. I missed Sara’s birthday car caravan last week. This is a new natural for our car-loving society—marking milestones behind the wheel, cruising into a new version of old rites of passage.

In the spring, a tall bush full of red blooms splashes a corner of Fuller Park. I didn’t know what it was, posted a photo with a question. Denise, a long-time neighbor several blocks away, responded: “Quince. I have a yard full. Come get some.” It was several years ago that I planted Denise’s spindly, thorny twigs, feeling doubtful. Soon after, she moved away and the flippers who bought her house gutted it, razed the yard of quince and everything else as flippers do, seeing no profit in preservation. I was surprised the spiny branches sprouted leaves the next year and the next. This spring, this coronavirus spring, the quince bloomed for the first time, a remnant of erased origins, a sign of perseverance.

Patricia Dubrava retired from teaching creative writing at Denver School of the Arts and currently teaches creative writing and literary translation for University College, University of Denver. Dubrava’s translations have appeared in many journals, most recently The Massachusetts Review, Spring 2020. She has lived in the Whittier neighborhood of Denver for nearly 40 years. Her blog, on which she practices the short form personal essay is www.patriciadubrava.com.