Yesterday morning we sat with our morning coffees overlooking the back of the side garden. Out of the grey skies came an unpredicted brief rain shower. This brief imprisonment indoors was pleasant as it possessed a more tender naturalness than this extraordinary plague, shelter-in-place quarantine has had in store for us.

Our Hostess City in its self-proclaimed Coastal Empire had long ago shrugged off its old smug, placid air as the state’s founding town and center of commerce for the Georgia’s first 150 years. The core of the city remains stunning with its historic pre Revolutionary War through Civil War historical district, its Victorian era neighborhoods and the pre and post WW I developments running from north to south over 2 miles making it one of the most beautiful residential cities in the American south if not the entire country.

If you had never seen the place with its public gathering places and gardens and were asked to describe them with precision, you would have required serious brain chemical adjustments.

How could one conjure up a picture of a place with songbirds, with gorgeous century and two century old trees, gardens large and small, public parks and squares in which you could hear the beat of bird wings and the gentle rustle of fallen live oak leaves. This town is a thoroughly beautiful place.

Its seasons are discriminated by changes in the sky colors, the feel of the air and certain smells. All you need to divine spring’s coming is the yellowish, tree pollen that floats down unseen for several weeks to coat our sidewalks, cars and porches. Once here, the feel of spring air is supercharged with the blossoming of ubiquitous Confederate Jasmine vines that encircle our mailboxes, trellises and fences and whose aromas make the town’s pedestrians and bees wander about drunkenly.

It’s spring that cries for us to spend much time in the gardens as well as garden and nursery marketplaces (NB they are essential business down here during this pestilence). During the summer the sun bakes our houses and gardens dusty bone-dry, leaving many no option but to survive these days of fire indoors behind closed shutters until the early evening when temperatures abate and the bugs go to bed allowing us to enjoy the town’s gardens fragrant roses. In autumn, on the other hand, we experience infrequent but sometimes serious Atlantic hurricane season winds and deluges, making it a time of depressing humidity interspersed with brief wind-howling moments of fear. Early winter often brings us really pleasant weather, the scents of decaying leaves and the first hint of oak wood fires in neighborhood backyard fire pits.

Before this plague’s arrival, the passions of our local youth could be wild, bordering sometimes on violence, but were mostly short-lived. On the other hand the vices of older folks like your scribe seldom ranged beyond an addiction to restaurant dining and unscheduled “socials” at local dive bars and small music venues.

While these habits were not peculiar to our town, certainly nothing like them is commonplace nowadays. We no longer see people working from dawn till dusk and then directly proceeding to fritter away their time and money, over coffee or cocktails, in cafes small-talking what time was left for living. That is in our past and it might become permanently so for this plague’s survivors.

Nevertheless, there still exists street blocks here where neighbors like ours have the time, money and desire to continue our past behaviors without provoking the authorities to issue us cease and desist orders for gathering in our yards for an evening, health enhancing, and pain relieving toddy.

What has passed quickly from exceptional to commonplace in my view during this plague is the difficulty one experiences in dying during this pestilence. “Difficult,” at least initially sufficed, but as circumstances changed, it became an inadequate descriptor, moving onto “discomfort.” Now the most accurate adjective is “depressing.”

How so?

Being ill and standing by and supporting the afflicted are never agreeable, but we are a town whose people stand by one and all, so to speak, when you are sick. You could, after a fashion, be among your friends and family all the way, even if the end came. This plague does not allow for this.

Plague invalids need huge attentions; yet, due to limited resources and this disease’s contagiousness, we are told, until the arrival of extreme distress, to rely on what’s available at one’s home. No visitors please. That’s natural enough on the surface of it; but, bless the hearts of the health officials, it’s a tad (no, damn) inhumane. Yet, somehow we will become inured to saying our goodbyes to loved ones over speaker phones as they gulp their last ventilator-assisted breaths.

Think what it must be for the dying — trapped behind hundreds of walls, real ones and those imposed by rules and the microbes, first mildly feverish and then sizzling with an execrable heat, while the rest of the town sits in their homes or hanging out on their smart phones, discussing what’s on cable news or latest show or series that NETFLIX just dropped. The plague waylays the dying into a cruel final isolation. This disease is one of utter loneliness.

The haphazard observations above give at best a so-so idea of what our town and Empire at large during this plague have been like.

Oh, one last thing, social unrest here is quite unknown among us — way too many folks here have weapons, training to use them, adequate ammo, and a willfulness to protect themselves, family and friends. There will be no spasmodic mobs marching about plundering or burning plague houses.

Last rounds, so to speak:

We are approaching the end of this plague’s first period, a relatively quiet one (albeit with bewildering portents) despite the media’s 24/7 attempts to stir the pot, and the beginning of another, more trying, in which the perplexities of our early shelter-in-place days gradually might give way to terrors and panic as hundreds and soon thousands succumb daily. Media coverage, so slavish of news about the first phase’s equipment and preparation shortfalls, will then have nothing to say other than the daily numbers. Their ever-present, near real time, updated, box score counts of infections and deaths will soon become visual background noise. Mother Nature will protect us from this mushrooming fungus of destruction by blinding us to the emotional impact of these numbers.

Let’s also not forget that they will shift their focus to grieving family vignettes. For these panic spreading media plague rats will not be allowed to witness, let alone do on-scene remote reporting on these events, since by government decree people will be dying in their homes or in make shift tent hospitals away from the cameras’ eyes.

With funerals no longer a permitted public activity in many states and cremations likely to slow and then pause, let us hope that things do not go the way of the city state of Athens when it suffered a long ago plague. Its townsfolk kindled plague-fires on the seashore. The dead were brought there after nightfall, but there was not room enough; so, the living fought one another with torches for a space where to lay their dearly departed. They engaged in bloody conflicts rather than abandon their dead to the waves. We should not forgot that similar back-ups in the disposal of Wuhan’s plague dead have been seeping out from China despite the Communist censors’ best efforts.

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