Winter and Covid Seem to Last Forever

 

The bleak winter landscape lasts into spring.

There's an old joke some smart-ass comedians used to repeat over and over again on the Pocono Mountain comedy circuit of lavish hotels and seedy nightclubs.

It was a snarky comment about a very serious subject, life itself.

"Life is difficult, boring and painful, and it seems to go on forever," they'd say. "Then it's over all too soon."

Well, this winter and covid both seem to go on and on but neither the season nor the disease are ending all too soon.

We were promised at one point that covid would just disappear, like magic, and it hasn't.

Now winter itself seems to have gotten sick with the disease.

It just won't end but continues to hack up storms, spit out snow and sneeze all over us with the cold winds that should have fled long ago.

Where are the spring flowers on the forest floor?

Covid is the bitch that steals away life and health, and winter seems to think it can do the same with spring. Day after day I take the dog out for his morning walks in the park and it's always the same thing. If I'm not worried when other hikers sneeze or cough or wheeze as they walk by, I'm pulling in my neck, zipping up my jacket or pulling along a reluctant pooch who has more sense than I do and simply wants to go home and lie down on his comfortable bed.

It's April 10, 2022, for god's sake.

The springtime trees still sleep.

Aren't we modern human beings? Aren't we over the ravages disease brings and knowledgeable about when the seasons arrive? Can't we control these things, control disease and wake up to sunshine when sunshine is scheduled to fill the skies and replenish the fields with life?

No, we're not modern human beings.

There are no such creatures.

We are as we always have been. We have the same ten fingers and ten toes that our ancestors had ten thousand years ago.

We have the same lungs that fill with air and are attacked by disease, the same hearts that stop beating when they can no longer stand to beat, and we have the same souls that fill with fear when death threatens us.

We can't control or schedule any of it.

This scene could have been
from a ten thousand years ago.

Life is difficult, boring and painful, and it seems to go on forever. 

Then it's over all too soon.