Backstory: In the midst of the Coronavirus / Covid-19 pandemic in the USA, Mid-March, 2020, a friend in Florida posted an idea she got from her friend in Oz: “Friends who are self isolating and looking for a way to occupy their brains, I challenge you to write a letter in Victorian inspired prose, describing your experience of the world right now. Go on! It will be fun!” I took the challenge:
Dear David Kuhns:
I hear, in most places, that silence fills the city streets. Where there was once shouting, honking, screeching, frantic waving, in Wuhan, Milan, Seattle, Montego, Chattanooga, Somewherebya, there rolls an endless void, hanging still, like death’s fog, over the sterile world.
I pity those who live there. Through no fault of their own, they stay inside, trapped, isolated, millions alone together.
My world is not their world. Not at all. Oh! How I wish I could share the noise that surrounds my house on this hickory’d hill. For where they have city silence, I have none but nature’s noise. Just this morning, I stepped outside to a cacophony of chirping, squawking, barking, and sweet voices laughing, calling.
Our feathered friends, welcomed back to this once sterile, lawned place, now covered with wildflowers, brush piles and birdfeeders, compete with each other to sing the longest and the loudest.
The mockingbird wins.
Two dogs, one golden, one blue heeled, excitedly bark and yap as they chase down and sniff out squirrels, rabbits, vols and the occassional deer that languidly wanders across our lower pasture, which has, for the past couple of weeks, sent up bright green shoots, welcoming spring and providing food.
And the laughter and calling! Oh, David! My heart swells as I hear and see the neighbor’s children run across their yard to mine, where Marnie Pehrson Kuhns and I stand, I barefoot on an exposed and mossed limestone shelf, listening to the earth speak peace to us.
The children joyfully run to us, laughing and calling “Uncle Dave! Aunt Marnie!” And they lovingly wrap their small yet strong arms around us and hug us deeply, tightly, as though they would infuse all the love they carry in their hearts, into us, to calm us and protect us. For on our hill, in this space, there is no social distancing, no unusual isolation. We are family. Where one goes, we will all go. And that, gladly.
Yes, life here, in the oak and hickory woods, in the fields, in the wildflower’d pastures, is quite different. It is noisy, energetic, vitally alive.
It hasn’t changed much from when we moved here nearly three years ago. And I’m glad for that.
Rest well. Seek peace. Find hope.
