Where Are We Now?
At least in the United States, we seem to be undergoing an attitudinal and operational shift. While here the death toll from Covid is verging on a million, and the total number of Covid-caused deaths worldwide—thought to be greatly underestimated—is in the six million range, there has been a drop in new cases in most of the U.S., some businesses—those that survived the lockdown—and some offices are now operational in person. Mask mandates are rapidly disappearing. Children are physically in school. Vulnerable people are now eligible for a vaccine booster every six months, and the government will mail you home testing kits, free of charge.
With amazing rapidity vaccines and remediations have been developed, and these, in concert with prudent behavior, will be our protections going forward. It sounds encouraging. And yet, the scenario seems to modulate whenever the future appears to become a little less fraught. Just this month there has been an uptick of cases in Germany, Britain, and Asia. This may be the template of the future, a world of permanent pandemic, of whiplash changes of behavior in response to the virus’s twists and turns, where we cope with Covid just as we cope with influenza and other potentially lethal diseases.
Always on my mind is how the pandemic has grabbed our intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities. Since 2020 this seizure has been as much a part of ongoing reality as the physical suffering caused by Covid. In this issue we feature essayists who delineate distinctive ways that contact with nature leads to self-knowledge, poets whose acute portrayal of human relationships is achingly realistic, an artist whose magnolias bloomed during pandemic isolation, and a fiction writer who explores one character’s obsession with recycling to the nth degree. Together these works offer a spectrum of creative responses to the pandemic. Their inspiring variety affirms the beautiful strength of individuality.
Selma Moss-Ward
Editor
March 20, 2022
Magnolia, mixed media
I work primarily with paint, ink, papers, prints, charcoal and canvas: a conventional vocabulary for its familiar historical reference. My images contain many diverse layers of meaning from the universal to the specific and personal, frequently giving reference to my
Footprint Zero
Joy was thrilled when she learned that the grocery delivery service had stopped using cardboard boxes in favor of reusable plastic bags. Not that she would ever order from them again, not after the one time she succumbed and
Florentino
The second strange summer of the pandemic, it was the evenings I longed to avoid. The softening of the day’s sounds, a change in the song of the birds, the light gone sleepy, and the awakening of the
A Pandemic Postscript
It seems like yesterday their lives collided with mine, turned my world topsy turvy despite all my precautions. For nearly two months, whenever I left the house I looked around to ensure I was alone, that
Two Truths
“If she called you right now, how soon would you kick me out of here and run to her?” I asked. Without hesitation, his eyes still closed, he said, “In a minute.” We lay there in
