It is our habit in the darkness, right after I turn off the alarm on my iPhone, for me to tap the WeatherBug icon and tell P what to expect while driving to work each morning. She had gotten into the habit of asking me about the forecast at some point in our predawn routine, so she'd know whether to don a jacket or start the truck remotely to get the heater going. I've gotten out in front by just having my weather brief ready to go before we even turn on the light.
This morning's Weatherbug prediction seemed impossible--mixed precipitation throughout the day, with up to an inch of snow accumulating by lunchtime. Yesterday I was walking through town basking in the soft spring morning; today we're back to winter. The prospect is a little demoralizing.
The locals warned us this was coming. Every year the Southern Tier gets hit with at least one last spasm of frozen weather as winter loosens its grip on the place. They've had snow here in May. Why did we think this year would be any different? That snow falls every spring on a landscape exploding in life and color, just like now. We just tell ourselves we've reached the end of this icy hibernation, prematurely it seems.
A few fat flakes float by as I write this, with the hills shrouded in clouds and starting to take on a familiar white tinge as the upper elevations get their dusting.
Meanwhile, it seems our hope for an end to this long pandemic winter recedes as a fourth Covid wave strikes pretty much the entire planet. Brazil continues to descend into chaos with its Trumpian style of pandemic management, which is to say no management at all, with a healthy dollop of denial. Rational, disciplined Germany is seeing its hospitals swamped and unable to treat this wave's victims. States in the U.S. that acted aggressively to stop the spread are in much the same shape as their laissez-faire neighbors.
I don't see all this as evidence that there's no point in trying to control the virus, and one could make the argument that what is happening now presents rather stark proof that we all are in this together, the entire planet, and if any one community chooses not to play along, there is no act of prophylaxis that will save those who try to act responsibly. That's been the message of the environmental movement for years, hasn't it? There is no nest we can foul at some distant latitude that doesn't amount to fouling our own, and my neighbor's decisions impact my life in this shared biome.
So the pandemic probably won't end, not entirely, and facets of this way of life will likely go on for years, perhaps indefinitely. Green shoots and the occasional snow shower, in an endless cycle of infection and reinfection, all rooted in the human folly of our anarchic approach to the problem.
I have cases that never end, as well. There are some lawyers who have used the cover of the Covid lockdown, following the crushing blow Hurricane Michael delivered to our legal community and infrastructure, to bob-and-weave literally for years, making sure cases never advance, never get closed or settled or tried. This morning I'll be subjected to yet another hearing in a case that actually was closed not long after the storm, but the tired old judgment keeps getting reopened so the lawyers can fight some more over, well, I can't even really say what this one is about, except to note that it seems one of the parties is having trouble letting sleeping dogs lie. It is a sad fact that if one side doesn't want a piece of litigation to conclude, it's almost impossible to force the issue, especially now when the pandemic has become a get out of jail free card for lawyers who don't want to work or to close a file, or for parties who use the cover of lock-down to kick the can down the road indefinitely.
Then again, if nature is our guide we should know that nothing ever really ends, except perhaps our own individual existence. Seasons are just a fuzzy construct that may ignore our attempts to draw sharp temporal lines, diseases mutate into other diseases in an endless chain that leads back to the first virus. The earth quit being flat centuries ago, and if I take off and head due west from here with an unlimited supply of Avgas, I'll be right back here if I keep flying long enough. Earth as infinity. The fact that we end predisposes us to the illusion that things end, that time has a beginning and an end, a fallacy that quantum physics picks apart with each new discovery. And if that's the case, how can theology in its present form, with its teleological framework borrowed from Aristotle, provide meaningful answers to any of the challenges before us?
Oops. I seem to have wandered down a rabbit hole again.
Time to clean up, slip on a bow tie, and present my forced smile via Zoom to the judge in the latest installment of the Case That Never Ends. But perhaps there's some comfort in just accepting that infinity is the way of everything in this created universe, and this useless piece of litigation is no exception.
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