Making a Renaissance

By: | April 6, 2020

This post is not implying a resemblance between the current pandemic and the perfect storm of disasters that hit Florence in the mid-1300s. Nor is it evidence for the half-assed notion that out of disaster comes good. It is only to say that sometimes beauty has deep roots. This first ran January 17, 2012.

To the left is a courtyard in the Church of the Ognissanti, All Saints, in Florence, Italy. You can’t see it in this picture, but above the little staircase, near the top of the doorway, about where the arch meets the wall, is a small sign. It’s something like the one below: In 4 November, 1966, the waters of the Arno came to this height.

Florence is full of these signs. Most of them are from 1966, which was the most recent and worst of centuries of regular floods. They happen every 15 years or so, 56 of them since the first historic bad one in 1177. The Arno floods because the local weather swings wildly between dry and rainy and when it rains, it doesn’t stop. I was there in 2010, when it rained for 10 days straight, and while the Arno didn’t flood, for days it was ugly: it was a thick brown and fast, full of waves and whorls, making a continuous low roar. Florence is in the Arno’s floodplain, so when it does flood, it takes out the bridges, people lose their homes and businesses, ancient art and books are destroyed, people die. The flood in 1333 wasn’t the worst, but its timing was bad and for the next 15 years, Florence was visited by one disaster after another.  And after disaster came the Renaissance.

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The Year Time Stood Still

By: | April 3, 2020

I have somehow become involved in wholesale Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) procurement. That is not my job, and I know nothing about it, but the old rules no longer apply in this sudden new world. All it takes now, apparently, is to know some people with particular connections in China and all of a sudden you have state governments and federal agencies clamouring at your cellphone, lighting up your home screen with the photo of your cat on it. I sense the urgency of the world squeezing through a bottleneck of production capacity and I am glad to be merely a switchboard operator in that game, forwarding emails from my people to theirs, hoping I am helping.

Meanwhile time has, in other ways, stopped. Mortgages are frozen where I am, rent in some places is suspended. School has stopped, no matter what the three homeschoolers on my Facebook feed pretend. Many people’s incomes have stopped. That is not sustainable, but this will, nevertheless, go on. For the academic year or for the calendar year? I don’t recall anything ever being quite so up in the air.

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By: | April 2, 2020

Notice: due to distraction, the People of LWON are posting only Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays. We’ll be back in strength in the foreseeable, we hope, and meanwhile wash your hands and socially distance because we love you.

A Note to Our Readers

By: | March 31, 2020

Dear Readers of LWON,

Like everyone else, the People of LWON are still adjusting to life with Covid-19, especially those with kids at home, parents at large, and full time jobs, remote and not. We’ll be posting less frequently for a while, but please keep coming to visit every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

We’ll keep serving up as much comfort and diversion as we can muster, and return in force once things settle down. 

Wash your hands, we love you.

The People of LWON

Watching and Waiting

By: | March 30, 2020
Green leaves growing on a chain link fence

From my apartment most of the view is a small parking lot, a few stories below me, lined by vines and a few weedy trees.

The last few weeks, a mockingbird has been loudly claiming this as his territory. On and on and on, a few phrases of a song he’s learned, then to the next song, then to the next one and the next. The dead stems of winter are turning green, hiding the chain link fences.

I’ve spent more time than usual admiring this little parking lot this month. The space between my desk, on the inside wall of my apartment, and the compost bins, at the far corner of the parking lot, are most of my world right now.

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Holding space

By: | March 27, 2020

I have begun to visit the trail behind my house with religious devotion. It switchbacks up a sundrunk slope, mostly melted out from the snow, and tops out at a cliff overlooking the valley where I live. I go because it’s spring, and the smell of thawing soil and sweetening ponderosa bark calls me outside. I go because, for a short time at least, I can feel the fingers of sun kneading my neck and shoulder muscles, releasing knots of worry for my family, my friends, my community, as the novel coronavirus licks through our people like wildfire. The first flowers are out. White flickers of spring beauty scatter the ground, and yellow pinches of something I can’t name. The first green grass threads between orange fallen needles. Snowflakes bluster from a few clouds in the otherwise blue sky. Things are beautiful; things are terrible. Cognitive dissonance has become my forever feeling.

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Migrants

By: | March 26, 2020

Three weeks and approximately two lifetimes ago, I went to Rock Springs, Wyoming to meet some migrants. The pilgrims in question were mule deer, a whole herd of ‘em, who trek each spring from the sere sagebrush valley where they winter to alpine summer pastures, devouring fresh green-up as they wander. Along the way they navigate a litany of obstacles, both natural and human-made: They swim lakes and ford rivers, climb mountains and traverse deserts, squeeze under barbed-wire fences and pick their way through oil-and-gas fields and, most terrifying of all, dash across highways. And all of it, I should add, while pregnant with twins. 

To get to Rock Springs, of course, required a substantial migration of my own, entailing two planes and a rental car, a carbon-binging annihilation of space and time that would have seemed like genuine magic to my not-too-distant ancestors. Less than a month later, travel now seems an extravagance, not to mention an unconscionable public health danger. A few months hence and we may all end up like the survivors in Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s dystopia about the aftermath of a pandemic, incredulous at the notion that those rusting steel cigars called airplanes ever leapt from the ground.

The age of unfettered human mobility, now on hiatus, has come at the expense of most other organisms. Animals as small as mice and as large as elephants are losing their ability to freely bestride the landscape, their worlds ever more circumscribed by the frenetic movements of a single overweening ape. It’s logical enough, then, to assume that a dramatic deescalation of human movement will permit other critters to reclaim some ground. Okay, the viral stories about the Venice swans were feel-good hokum, but I don’t doubt that far-ranging animals like those Wyoming deer will find a more accommodating migrationscape this spring. 

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