Regressing, Repeating Or Regenerating?

 This Spring, so far, has been strange in all sorts of ways.  For one, people are, in some ways, acting as if the COVID-19 pandemic is over:  They're not wearing masks; they're going to restaurants and movies and taking trips.  On another, sometimes I encounter people I haven't seen since the disease struck, or have seen only in passing, and I don't feel as if I am looking at, or talking to, the same person I knew.  Perhaps I, too, am no longer the person people once knew.  And strangers are even more anonymous, and even automotonic than they were before:  They seem even more walled-off from their surroundings, and other people, than they were three and a half years ago..

The weather has been strange, too.  Temperatures haven't been unusually warm--except for yesterday, when it reached 21C (70F)--but there have been combinations of wind and rain, rain and hail, wind and sun and even sun and rain we don't normally see.  There were even tornadoes in Delaware and South Jersey.

But one part of the weirdness of this season appeared to me the other day, during a late-afternoon ride.  That I saw cherry blossoms budding, or beginning to bloom--which always gladdens my heart--along Woodside Avenue wasn't, in itself, out of the ordinary for this part of the world in the first week of April.  But seeing them in that same act of their show as I saw in trees just a few miles away (and, I assume, at more or less the same latitude) three weeks ago made me wonder what's going on.

Not that I'm complaining about seeing what I saw the other day.  Of course, few trees are more beautiful in full bloom than the cherry blossoms.  But something about seeing those early blooms against the sky, in all of their fragility and ephemerality, gives me the strength of my vulnerability.