Void

The city quiets. Streets are drained of people, arteries full of air, I walk four miles down Broadway through a town changed. Times Square still blaring its bright lights into the atmosphere but everything ground level is black. Herald Square a serene haven for the homeless, now, and in Madison Square Park I stand in the middle of the intersection to take a picture, no cars around to stop me. Stay Home, they told us, and so, for once, we listened. Everything goes under, resturants close at the drop of a pin, do not even try to make it through what promises to be a long, unforgiving winter.

Yet in Brooklyn Botanic, the first cherry blossoms have popped on the Esplanade, with no one allowed to see it. In Union Square, the magnolias are bursting, and all through the West Village, the linden trees bubble and froth into existence. Spring is springing.

These flowers do not mind your pandemic plague, do not care for your human panic. The sun is out, the temperature is right, and so they bloom, because now is when that is done. What do they care the end of your world may be nigh. The seasons, after all, have been here before we arrived, and they will carry on long after we are so inevitably erased from their memories.

It is spring, now, and in spring they live.

We'd do well to try it, ourselves.