Last Friday I was in a cemetery attending a burial. It isn’t a new cemetery. Not only did I walk through this cemetery on my way home from grade school, Gary did the same eight years earlier, in the ‘60s.
I noticed a new grave a few yards away.
Then I noticed another.
Then I started counting. There were nine fresh graves I could see; who knows how many more if I had turned around.
Of course, I attributed the fresh graves to the Covid.
Later, though, I realized that it had rained that morning, at the end of a rainy week. Any exposed dirt will look new when it’s water-logged. I decided what I was looking at were just graves the grass hadn’t covered yet, and the muddy clumps were from the spring rains.
On the afternoon drive home, Gary and I saw a dead deer on the side of the road and said the requisite “Aww.” Still, I thought, odd, because the crews that tidy the roadkill usually get on it in the morning, and that deer looked like it had been dead a while, and “Oh God, is that another dead deer?”
Yes. Within half a mile another slightly smaller yet just as dead deer.
Again, I attributed the deer carcasses to the Covid. Not that they died of it, just that the crews hadn’t picked them up. I don’t suppose picking up dead deer is considered an essential task, and perhaps the people who usually report the roadkill are sheltering in place.
Or more likely, I want to attribute everything to Covid to give it more importance, because I want my life disrupted by something of significance rather than a nuisance.