Flood season

OK, the snow we could have done without.

Nobody was dreaming of a white Easter, and gray skies, biting wind and that thick blanket of white slush did nothing to put anybody into a particular Alleluia mood Sunday morning. However, to the prophetically minded, the heavenly message was clear: stay home, stay put, stay in – it’s the right thing to do. How else to interpret a holy day winter storm other than divine endorsement of the governor’s social distancing direction? Blessed are the stay-at-homes…

Blessed maybe, but man, it just feels weird.

Forget the lone pioneer legends of Daniel Boone and Pa Ingalls, we’re not a nation of hermits. Getting out to meet and greet is pretty much what we do and those who don’t – like the cranky old guy at the end of the block who only comes out of his house to sit in his car and yell at the neighbor kids between pulls on a pint of cheap whiskey – we consider to be not quite right, not folks we want to get too close to or trust too far. To most Americans, when they bring to mind the quintessential social-distanced, self-isolated individual it looks a lot like Ted Kaczynski, a.ka. the Unibomber.

Well, most of us haven’t gotten to the point of sending off packages of makeshift explosives as a way to pass the time of day, but it’s pretty clear that once this virus is vanquished, we’ll be hearing a lot fewer folks caught in shady doings claiming they are resigning to spend more time with family. By this point we’ve been Leave it to Beavered and Brady Bunched to the point where our Little House on the Prairie evokes dreams of Escape from Alcatraz. The folks who’ve been preaching how we need to go back to having families sit down for dinner together have gotten their wish, with lunch and breakfast thrown in, and now we’re all too well aware of each other’s dietary quirks and table etiquette faux pas. There are some things one person shouldn’t see another person squeeze ketchup upon … especially if that person is your own flesh and blood.

But we’re stuck, and it’s frustrating. The price of gas is lower than it’s been since seed corn was about the only hybrid and here we are with no where to go … and when we do have somewhere to go we worry there’ll be no toilet paper when we get there.

Normal just isn’t normal anymore. Just a month ago if you saw a person out in public wearing a mask and it wasn’t Halloween it was a safe assumption he was out to rob a bank. Now folks in the grocer’s produce aisle give it the look of a surgical suite and if, in a moment of inattention, you extend a friendly hand to an acquaintance you get a reaction once reserved for the likes of Typhoid Mary. There’s no way around it, it’s gonna be a long time before we regard someone with the sniffles with the same casual aplomb we did at the outset of what we thought was going to be this year’s “cold and flu season.”

But the truth is that all this anti-togetherness is working. We can see it pretty much anywhere that doesn’t look like Spain, Italy or New York City. We’re staying apart, staying home and it’s a pain – but people aren’t getting sick. People are staying alive. Doing what we’re doing is clearly the right thing to do.

But it is hard – hard on individuals and families; hard on small businesses; hard on the whole country, the whole world. And it’s particularly hard to keep doing these hard things when there’s no disaster looming in plain sight … even when what we are doing is the only thing that is keeping that disaster at bay. So this is a good time to remind each other of what everyone living in the floodplain is well aware of – the time to build the dike is before the river rises.

And flood season isn’t over yet.