A COVID-19 Spring, Featuring Beauty, Hope, and Ticks

Each year, Spring comes tiptoeing in the door, then jumps in fully with both feet, often dragging Summer in close behind. We on the northern plains know better than to trust it. We know that Spring has left the door open wide and might just as easily hop back out, giving Winter enough room to throw around a blizzard or two in a show of strength, or perhaps to blow frosty air over the budding trees, dust the fledgeling grasses and shoots with snow, and leave us all muttering, even though it’s exactly what we know to expect.

However, when warm weather does come back for good, we all rejoice, knowing the door has been firmly shut against the frigid air, and that’s the moment when two things happen: the ticks come out, and the turkey buzzards return.

When I lived in Ireland, the natural world in North America was a topic that inspired awe and trepidation. Whirling wind storms that could lift a house from its foundation, snakes, venomous spiders, tiny insects that feed off blood and leave disease in its wake, blizzards, bears, bison, mountain lions: all horrifying or fascinating, or both, depending on who was interested. Ireland, in contrast, felt as safe as a feather bed wherever nature was concerned. The worst things a person could encounter were a badger or a slick mountain side. Now, I don’t want to encounter a testy badger or get washed out to sea by a freak wave, but the lack of venom and man-eaters made a walk in the country pretty nice.

But back to the main concern. Yesterday, I found three ticks on me, so it must really be Spring this time. One was crawling up my pant leg, one was navigating the hairline at the nape of my neck, and one was probably shaken from my clothes before it landed in the steep basin of the bathroom sink.

They’re unwelcome little buggers. They show up just when the weather gets nice enough to stretch out on the grass and let the sun warm your poor, winter-worn limbs. They’re like sand in your bathing suit, grit in your picnic sandwich: just there to make a nice time not all that nice after all. If they serve a purpose, I have yet to learn it.

Turkey buzzards are similarly unwelcome, in my mind. Bulky, hunched creatures, hulking in gangs at the tree tops, They float silently over the houses, scouring the ground below for dead rabbits, squirrels, birds; finishing off the evidence of a harsh winter or a skilled house cat. My neighbor, a wildlife biologist, calls buzzards “nature’s vacuum cleaners,” and “super cool.” I’m sure they are, and I know they fit beautifully into their ecological niche, but dang are they creepy. Perching in our neighbor’s tree, they stretch out their huge black wings in the sun and stay like that, looking unsettlingly like vampires about to swoop in for the kill. My children love them. The toddler calls them “birdies.” Hmm. I know they won’t harm people, but I still get an urge to scoot the little ones indoors whenever they start their ghoulish circling (the buzzards, not the children.)

Nevertheless, here they are, the ticks and the buzzards, harbingers of change, whose presence announces joyfully to the world that the deep days of winter are behind us, at long last. They might as well be prancing through meadows, calling out that it’s spring! It’s spring! It’s spring! And if you don’t mind, they’d like to take a few sips of your blood, or chow down on some half mummified bunny leg from your yard while doing a fantastic Dracula impression.

I know there’s a COVID-19 thought about hope in here somewhere. Just give me a minute - I haven’t had my coffee yet.

…a minute…

…coffee…

Ok, here’s what I’ve got. On the northern plains, even in the twenty first century, we are often at the mercy of nature. We are used to waiting, months at a time, for the break that gives us our best days. We are a people who endure with hope, and a people adept at embracing the moment when good things finally come our way. We have to be! The dang climate won’t let us be otherwise. Northern plains people have (generally speaking) an astounding drive to get out and enjoy themselves, to tidy a flower bed like nobody's business, to produce a bounty of canned salsa from a patch of soil, to lounge on a boat and soak in every ounce of warmth that comes their way. Summer is our goal, a land of milk and honey that we have crossed the desert to enjoy. But there are a few speed bumps that nature provides us in the forms of critters mentioned here, and we have to negotiate those, too.

COVID-19 isn’t just a speed bump on the way to summer. This is more like a mountain. We’ve been joking that North Dakota people are great at social distancing and isolation anyhow, but who thought that this year would provide so much of it? The backyard barbecues, pool parties, neighborhood kids knocking on the door - there’s so much about spring and summer that gets us out of ourselves and into community: life-giving, heart-filling community. It seems unjust that we might miss it all this year. It’s starting to feel like we probably will, a winter that will last far too long.

Ticks and buzzards, those bearers of disease and flying momento mori that show up each year have always shown up. This year, if they decided to stay indefinitely, I wouldn’t be shocked; 2020 has been that way. But they won’t. They don’t. 

Eventually we will be able to wander among the hills and grasses without considering Lyme disease. We’ll say, ‘I’m glad they’re gone,” and “Isn’t this nice?” It will feel so good. (Except for the mosquitos, but I don’t want to think about them just yet.)

The COVID-19 curve will, God willing, eventually flatten. A vaccine will be developed. Some day we will be able to gather together again, to embrace our friends and family, kneel side by side in prayer, and to use the same ketchup bottle as everyone else at a party, willy-nilly, as if touching it couldn’t kill someone! What carefree abandon! What ease. What everyday, ordinary joy.

We will make it through this wintery solitude and past the hulking shadows that may remain afterward. Such good things are coming again and, oh, won’t it be wonderful when they do?



Note: This blog post doesn't feel finished, but here we go anyway 

Dispatch from the Quarantine

Quarantine, Day Fifteen. I know because I checked the calendar. It's not always apparent anymore what day it is and this is starting to feel a bit like childhood summers did, one day melting into the next. Now that April 30th is being thrown around as a date when all of this will perhaps-maybe-possibly end, I imagine there will be a lot of melting. But I did know that yesterday was Sunday and when evening came, I still had a notion knocking around that we would have to be ready in the morning to head out the door; that I'd have to make sure there were clean work trousers for my husband, clean school uniforms, a snack, and a washed and filled water bottle for our little guy. But I didn't need to do those things, and the realization of this came not with a jolt, but with a wash of relief.

Relief!

Relief seems almost wrong to feel, given what's happening. It's the same relief of realizing that I don't have to face meeting up with someone I have difficulty with, that I don't have to steel myself to face and respond to pointed criticisms respectfully - not at all, and possibly not for a long time.

Maybe isolation isn't all bad.

And yet I feel like I should cringe at that thought, because there's something tone-deaf about it, when health care workers who are friends of mine don't get to choose isolation, when single people, hospital patients, prisoners, and the elderly are forced into isolation and into its subsequent loneliness. Lucky me, that mine can contain a certain amount of relief. Perhaps being sheltered from this disease, and from the world, is something that my spirit has needed. After all, here I am, writing a blog post after nearly eighteen months without having even peeked at this particular corner of the internet.

There's some comfort in this isolation, too. I feel safe at home. I feel confident that my parents are safe from the virus, tucked up in their own cozy place a mile away. And our home is a blessing that we didn't realize the expanse of until we had to be here indefinitely. On the first day of school closures in our district, my husband and I stood looking out our back door and counted the ways we were grateful to be here. At our house, we have a spacious back yard with interesting nooks and crannies for the children to explore, ample sunlit space for our vegetable garden, low-sweeping tree canopies that can serve as a hiding spot or a fort, rock walls to scale, and three friendly families on each side of the fence. We have a pretty reliable income, and my husband can work from home - again, safely. We even have a secluded room (with a child-proof lock!) where he can go to work in peace, complete with a lovely view of spring creeping across the yard. We are so blessed in all of this. We are blessed that this virus arrived not in the deep freeze of January, but in the surprising warmth of an early prairie spring. We are blessed to live in a place that doesn't have a huge population, where we won't encounter quite as many people when we do have to venture out for food or exercise.

Blessing may be an odd word to use here in light of the big picture of this new virus and the havoc that it is wreaking on economies, cities, and lives, but not if you are a Christian. We are taught from the very start to look for God in all things, to lean on him in times of adversity, to literally put our trust in the Lord. I am trying to remember that this is it, the moment to trust.  I'm not saying that I have been doing it consistently. Day Three of the quarantine is when reality set in and I began to gain a picture of what we are facing and what might come of it. Reader, I had to sit on our staircase while the children watched a movie and take deep, slow breaths in order to stop the tears, to calm my beating heart and my shallow, panicked breathing that had come about from all of the 'what ifs' and 'how wills' that had been assaulting me all morning. This is a scary time, and in many moments over the past two weeks, I have not been trusting in Christ. The days that I have placed in His hands have, conversely, been wonderfully calm, ordered days. He will carry me through this if I let Him.  If I let Him. I mean, God is good all the time, right? Even now, even in this, He is good.

Last thought, I promise. Does anyone else feel like we are living the answer to the Litany of Humility? This prayer kept popping up in my facebook groups over the past few months and into my music streaming and oh look, this is life today.

Take care, trust in God, and wash your hands.