The Crown No One Wants

Magical thinking. None of us is immune. We are all the more susceptible when technology falls short. I had thought that La Corona might miss us. So many other things do. The hedgerow in photo above is rosa rugosa to feed the birds and scent the air and hold the wind at bay--or at least slow it. It is also a boundary of garden versus the comparatively wild moss or moor on the horizon in the photo. A flowering currant, a relic of someone else's garden, blooms incongruously, tenaciously among the peat and the reeds and the gorse. I dont think anyone digs their peats from there any more, and the old road which once passed along somewhere near there has gone without a trace. I mention that as if to justify my magical thinking.

But La Corona is here. Three cases in the hospital. Given the thousands elsewhere that hardly seems worth a mention except that there are so few of us. I don't know who they are. Without much difficulty I could ferret that information out because we are connected up here--not physically but socially. I will know someone who will know someone who will know who to ask. I don't want to know. I grieve for them and their family and friends whoever they are. And I have friends and family in the NHS gowning up to do battle against this new beast.

The promiscuity of La Corona means any of us is vulnerable. So those three in the hospital are just like us everywhere. Like John Donne's poem the bell tolls for us all.

The grey skies and 'little rain' of the morning are what my husband calls a good growing day. Spring is coming. The frittillaries that were just edging into
bloom are now chatting among themselves in a quiet corner as if nothing were awry.

And so we garden and we wait.

La Corona is as old as Life

and as new as today

her protean self is jealous

of the living things

and takes their breath away

We know her only

by her deadly passing

through the mead hall

no one sleeps easily now

where is Beowulf ?