A lot has happened in the past month any which way you measure it. The same is true, here, at J.G.P. MacAdam Online.
The past week has been especially eventful. I've completed a final structural edit of my science fiction novel, The Way Across, which is based on and taken from The Vallen, an earlier work, but completely reimagined and rewritten. I've also had two more short story publications added to my name, The Pickers, as Passengers Journal, and A Road Not Taken, at Apeiron Review. And what more the baby's toddling all over the house at this point and it's like having a little babbling penguin follow you around room to room.
But even more has happened in the past month—hasn't it?
I can remember, not a handful of weeks ago, seeing a snapshot of smoke billowing about the Washington Monument; and countless snapshots of the pulling down of one racist statue after the next and the complete re-branding, if you will, of those that couldn't be torn down; men speaking to each other of monitoring the police bandwidths; of cops firing "warning shots" at suburban housewives, telling them to get inside, obey the curfew; of armored vehicles rolling down the cul de sacs; of buildings, vehicles, shops, homes burning, burning, burning; and a people angry, a nation at once afraid of itself and fed up.
An economic crisis, a health crisis, and now a crisis of trust. Anxiety levels screaming. And the people in the stands, on social media, in their homes on their couches, saying: Let it burn. Let it all burn. Next to their spouse who weeps for the future.
It's times like these I like to take the baby outside.
The honeysuckle was blooming, at the time, and you could sniff its perfume just by strolling through the yard. The gnats have come out in their full glory, though early in the morning or late in the evening, there aren't so many of them.
The gales of spring are long over and the forest sits in a windless swelter. The AC's hum all around the neighborhood; our own never turns off and I've just learned that all of Jefferson County, West Virginia sits on the northern rim of America's only humid subtropical climate.
You can smell the humus of the forest floor—a decaying, leafy, mossy, warm dirt smell.
In the afternoon, everything stops. Nobody much wants to be outside; even inside you lay and sit and recline rather than do any chores, and you certainly don't turn the oven on if you can help it.
The leaves of every tree, even the sycamore's, are in their fullness and there's not much to do with each day but watch the shadows of the canopy sift across the lawn and leave dappled openings of sunlight turning everything it touches into a golden green glow.
Then it's back inside, to the fake images, and fake blackouts, and the reams of disinformation pushed by newly-created Twitter accounts, and to the bots trying to counteract the spread of falsehoods but in turn called falsehoods themselves...
...to the posts from local people, my own neighbors, warning everyone to be on the lookout for Uhaul trucks. Why? Because antifa is trying to infiltrate our neighborhood (to protest? to cause unrest? who knows...) and they're doing so by renting Uhaul trucks and packing as many of themselves in the back as possible...
...or, now that the media outrage has returned to the pandemic—to the rising cases, overloaded hospitals, etc.—there are now daily posts of people screaming about how they refuse to wear a mask, how they WILL NOT just roll over and let some governor or mayor or health official take their freedom from them...
...or the comments rolling in after, at least one of which always mentions a gun, as in "Time to lock and load!" or "I'm ready with my Smith & Wesson." or "I'd to see 'em try..."
...and, lastly, the one or two extra Confederate flags that have sprung up at the tops of flagpoles on the handful of properties that surround my own. I have noticed this and lost sleep over this, most of all...
And it's times like these that despite the overwhelming frustration that I feel in response to what my own neighbors are doing—my own people, in a way—I say nothing.
I resist the urge to counterclaim, to protest, to fly a flag of my own accord on the tree out front or online or anywhere.
It's times like these that I remind myself of the forest toads we found while following a hunter's trail one day. They were dark brown toads, living alongside a log, and my wife caught one and held it up for Alder, strapped to my chest, and then it peed in her hand and leapt off, legs outstretched kamikaze-style, and boy did that make the baby giggle...
The foxgloves are past their prime; but they seed and already seedlings of fresh luminous green are sprouting out of the soil. The summer waxes, July's always the hottest month, and Alder's first birthday is smack in the middle of it. He's a summer baby, and as the temperature rises and even the bees seem to take it a little easy visiting tuft after tuft of white clover in our lawn, the baby's mind and limbs grow only faster, and I remember there's something in that observation that's closer to the truth of things than anything: a lot can happen in so little time.
And that's all from the mountain, this perhaps week.