Quarantine Diary #62, 5/16/2020 - Invisible Crisis, Spring

Little Women Again: Louisa May Alcott volunteered as a nurse during the Civil War. She intended to serve three months but after several weeks she became deathly ill with typhoid pneumonia and went home. Typhoid was treated at that time with a medication made with mercury. She survived typhoid but would deal the rest of her life with an autoimmune disease possibly triggered by the mercury.  

After she recovered she wrote “Civil War Hospital Sketches” which became popular. Trying to support her always-broke family, she went on to write Little Women, the story of four sisters during the Civil War era.

The war affects the story. It determines who the players are, who lives in the house and who doesn’t. Prices are high and they can’t buy as much food and as many things as they want and need. People in their community are destitute and they try to respond.

But that is how the cataclysmic Civil War affects their lives. They miss their father and worry for his health and safety. Beth will help a poor family where she will catch scarlet fever. The war is in the background, but it doesn’t feel like the business of their daily life. It’s real but hard to see.

Hitler invaded Poland September 1, 1939. England was allied with Poland, so British bombers retaliated two days later. Germany would not directly attack England until a year later. For nearly a year, if English people didn’t know someone in the RAF, they didn’t feel as if they were in a war, except for high prices. They called that year their Invisible War.

Do you see where I am going?

Scientists tell us we are in an epic worldwide pandemic. Yet, this crisis seems invisible except for higher prices and weirdly inconvenient rules.

Because most of us we can’t see it right here right now, this crisis doesn’t seem genuine. Closed businesses, economic craziness, and bad politics are what we see. We don’t see the disease. We don’t see people coughing, exhausted, scared. We don’t see inside nursing homes under siege. The health crisis itself is invisible to most of us, so we don’t believe it and we don’t believe it has much to do with us or we have much to do with it.

It's weird that to be people of faith these days – we have to live and act as if a crisis exists. Because it does.

…

I’m just back from a walk. I hadn’t been out walking since before the Supreme Court struck down the Safer at Home protocols.

I was out not even five minutes when I began to notice that this is pre-Covid Waukesha. Lots of people are out and about. Small clumps of folks (maybe just family, maybe not) are relaxing at a park along the river. The restaurant and bar I walked past each had their doors open and there were lots of people inside. I didn’t check for masks. Not my job. I had to wait at intersections for the walk light because there is the regular amount of traffic again.

I hope I am wrong to worry. I hope everyone is okay and will stay okay. People are definitely out and about in Wisconsin again.

…

Along the railroad tracks near my house some random apple trees are blooming. When I was a kid moseying around the fields and woods near where I lived, I picked apple blossom branches in the spring. I never had a proper knife with me, so I would wrangle the branches off the tree, which was hard to do. I generally mangled the blossoms in the process. Whatever. I went ‘mano a mano’ with those trees way back in the woods, planted by settlers long gone. I saw history before I read it.

Now I take a photo with my phone. I still don’t have a knife with me, but my phone is handy.

 What seems more real in your life?

Newly blooming spring or the Covid-19 crisis?

...

A. E. Housman (1859–1936). A Shropshire Lad. 1896.

 II. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now         

Is hung with bloom along the bough,      

And stands about the woodland ride      

Wearing white for Eastertide.    

Now, of my threescore years and ten,         

Twenty will not come again,       

And take from seventy springs a score,  

It only leaves me fifty more.       

And since to look at things in bloom        

Fifty springs are little room,            

About the woodlands I will go    

To see the cherry hung with snow.