Waiting for Rain

Since we are socializing outdoors these days, the weather makes a strong play for whether a coffee, walk, lunch or dinner (suitably masked and/or distanced) will go on.  Storms gather to the south and east of us, one promising to take a name as a tropical depression.  So far, however, clouds split as they pass over our town, sparing not a drop for us.  It's been dry here, and the usual summer's heat has been intensified by oppressive humidity. After my walks each morning and each evening, I return home drenched.  We wouldn't mind the 87-90% clogging the air if a little ground-nourishing water went along with it, but the ground is about at the hard, cracked stage, and the gardens are drooping.  Joseph's new hydrangea looked desolate by Sunday.

A few minutes ago, though, a friend called to say that she thought her backyard dinner had better wait for another evening...the weather radar showed a rain heading our way. 

So we are waiting to see whether that green-yellow-orange system stalled over Georgia will reach us finally.  In the meantime, my friend Joanne kindly packed up her already-cooked meal to send me...we will dine each in our own homes, trying to imagine the conversation real presence might engender.

 That, I think, has been the most difficult thing about the sequestering this viral outbreak has necessitated.  With each new report of conditions, we try to squirm around changing parameters of safety, hoping for a chance to be among friends and family.  The late news that outside is safer than inside brings a lot of relief, at least to me...it means that even while I skirt the (amazingly, alarmingly) oblivious walkers and runners, who do not seem to have heard that masks and distance can save them (I am pretty sure they are not, as the song goes, thinking of me), the natural world of path and garden salves jitters, and there are plenty of alternate paths one can take to avoid trouble.

This morning, watching a mother and her toddler exploring an ant pile between bricks on the quad, or the woman with cane whose slow gait along one arboretum path led me to turn onto an alternate route, I thought about how, ordinarily, I would have stopped to have a chat with either or both.  One can wave across the distance, or smile from across the greenery, but there are now fewer possible real connections to people who share a shrimking world.

Joanne and I will find another way to catch up, and so will I with others I know.  But that woman with the cane (who, on any day when my knees are cranky, might be I) looked as if a conversation with anyone could bring her out of her funk.

And that's the trouble, right there.  We are all, no matter what our resources, waiting for rain...for the chance to join the community again, to be a part of the wider world.  Other parts of the world are opening, but farther beyond us than we can reach right now.  And some, open, are closing up again. We wonder how long this drought will last, even while we know that wondering is useless.

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On the street, in the park and around the neighborhood, things are just the same. I come to the conclusion that I can do no more about others' social disregard than I can about the rain.  I carry a mask or an umbrella, spontaneously diversify my routes, and hope for the best.

But what's this?  As I am about to post this, I look outside, and suddenly I am running to catch
the first sign of relief!

Rain...at last...one wonders how long it will last.