When a warm wind rolls up from the south it wraps itself around the American flag planted in our front yard. If the hard water of our sprinklers has not completely darkened the spotlight in the flower bed at the bottom of our flagpole, the flag dances in the light. The ribbons of white and red ebb and flow through the darkness. If we are driving home at night, we nearly always comment as we turn into the culdesac: “Oh my, isn’t that just so lovely?” We pause up there, before we roll down into our driveway, and gaze for half a human second. There is just something majestic about that flag. The direction of the stripes was made for active mountain air.
I’ve been pondering the value of air the last few days. It’s warming up now, in this mid-March thaw, and the crocuses have pushed through the winter-worn soil. Today I saw hyacinths pregnant with color, ready to burst. I leave the window next to my side of the bed cracked open all winter long, unless the temperatures dip below zero. It’s been a long held belief that fresh air is medicinal. I’d rather fall off to sleep snuggled under a down comforter with a chlly little nip at my nose than be tucked into a toaster oven with the heating vent blowing in my face. The only thing that makes me occasionally want to close that window is a strong burst of seasonal pollen.
My friend Annick tells me her mom never made up their beds in the morning. Instead, her Swedish mother came in and flung the bedcovers off the sheets, opened the windows and let the linens air out for an hour. She then returned and made up the beds and closed the windows.
I recall the clotheslines of my childhood, some of them strung between two sturdy metal T shaped poles, some of them looped like an inverted umbrella set atop a single pole. Soft cotton towels whipped in the fresh Idaho wind. Sheets and pillows and soft white diapers danced like our front yard flag does now. I don’t recall the basket of clothes brought in from the line smelling that good when we moved to Pittsburgh, but that was in the era of belching steel mills. Our mom learned to use the electric dryer in Pittsburgh. Now we use fabric softening sheets in the dryer to try to imitate what God put naturally in his recipe for air.
We are steadily swirling into the whirlpool of this pandemic of Coronavirus right now in America. My sister Sue texted this afternoon that they have been ordered to shelter in place where she lives in the San Francisco Bay area of California. Shelter at home, except only in emergencies, until April 7that the earliest. That’s 3 weeks from now. Canada has closed its borders to all except US citizens, who are exempt for the moment. Our daughter Kate lives in upstate New York but is earning her doctorate degree at Brock University in Canada. She crosses the Canadian border every day. They have closed the doors of the university. But school goes on via technology. Kate has to do a presentation tomorrow, using Facetime. Then she will close up her house and hop on a plane in Buffalo because the buzz in the air is that there will be a national travel ban, and New York is just plain too far from her support network. It’s a curious thing to me to think of Kate coming home to us, sitting in a chair up there in the air.
She is coming more for us than for herself. If this goes on and on, then I need to know she has people who love her close by. I’m praying they do not ground airplanes before she gets here.
Restaurants are being ordered closed. Stores are limiting their hours. The stock market is plummeting. All the public schools in Utah have been ordered closed by the Governor. Calvin, Beth and Tess spent the day here with me while Annie and Jordon worked. We are all trying to process what is happening. It is a strange and disturbing time. We do not personally see the sickness yet, but we hear it is coming. The big unknown lays before us like a velvety black curtain. We sit here watching, waiting for it to open and reveal the stage.
Meanwhile, I still open my window and welcome the air. I breathe it deeply, when I think of it, demanding my lungs practice the routine, imagining how this respiratory illness might challenge me if it found me. I open my window and let the fresh pre-spring air come in with its army of angels. I whisper a prayer with the opening, praying for health for me and mine, but praying also for strength to endure and triumph regardless of what the wind blows our way.
