Newsletter – March 28, 2025
PHOTO: Angel wearing her festive holiday sweater on a winter walk. She’s wondering why we’re not jumping over the fallen tree limb.
Could it actually be five years from the start of the COVID epidemic? And do you know where you stashed your masks to pull them out for the upcoming Bird Flu epidemic? No? Hopefully we won’t need them.
I have a surreal and haunting memory of the spring blossoms and the budding trees from 2020.
Angel and I continued to take our morning walks every day, keeping all of our trail buddies at a discrete distance if we stopped to say hello at all. This was before the vaccines were developed, of course, and I remember walking about fifty yards behind another hiker, smelling her shampoo and thinking, “If the virus is carried through the air and I can smell her scent, is six feet of social distancing even enough?”
I developed a strong sense of self-preservation during that time and will admit that I consciously stood upwind of people who stopped to talk to me. The world was in lockdown, after all, and still people were dying by the hundreds, the thousands, every day.
Then suddenly Mother Nature shook off her winter lockdown and started to run headlong into spring. My logical mind understood the natural state of things but my emotional mind couldn’t process this. We were on hold! Nature shouldn’t be breaking the the rules. No one should!
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
I guess I passed the test, but not before processing those opposed ideas. That required me to lean into my mixed feelings as well as the unnerving pull from two directions.
I remind myself to let my characters have such contradictory experiences as well. It makes for weighty moments in their lives, which is always a more interesting read.
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My middle grade novel, The Most Amazing Museum of Los Angeles, is available through The BookBaby Bookshop at https://store.bookbaby.com/book/the-most-amazing-museum-of-los-angeles
Eric Margerum 