Memorial Day Sunday During the Pandemic

24 May 2020

My neighborhood is sort of self-contained. Glencairn is bounded by two main north/south corridor roads.  The northern boundary is a five-lane trunk road with a speed limit of 45 mph hour.  The southern end is permeable but kind of follows the path of an east/west corridor road that has a terminus on the eastern boundary of the neighborhood.  South of that line is well worn student housing.  North of the line are owner occupied buildings with well-tended gardens and signs in the yard that say, “Drive as Though Your Children Lived Here. SL0W!!!”

Mine is an older neighborhood with the vast majority of the houses being built before World War II.  If you know where and how to look, there are lots of old-style building features like stone windowsills and Bavarian inspired wavy roofs. Lots of houses have trellises and climbing flowers.

On the eastern side of my neighborhood and across the north-south corridor road is a neighborhood that was built after the war. This neighborhood was meant to be an upscale neighborhood and has much, much larger lots.  Some houses there have front porches with columns that stretch for their full two stories.  Many of the houses are clearly architect designed and build. My opinion, antebellum columns don’t work in this cold weather state.  I mean a grand porch is usable for what ninety days out of a year?

A goodly number of the houses in the upscale neighborhood were clearly inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School of architecture.  These houses have flat roofs, long horizontal windows at the top of their brick walls to provide light, and oddly shaped rectangular windows bringing bright sunlight into one corner of the house.

Went walking through this neighborhood I have been describing this morning just for a change of pace.  The route was about forty minutes in duration and 2.25 miles in length.  The ample yards on this walk had carefully manicured lawns and were abundantly populated with flowers.  As we walked the smell of lilacs arose again and again, so sweet, so evocative of summer’s start. The splashes of purple, red, yellow and orange flowers in the beds and around the borders of these lawns offered my spirit encouragement in this dark time. 

One lawn at one house really caught my attention.  The place was one of those Prairie School homes, all brick with brown and umber tones about it.  Beyond the Wright attraction, the owners were art lovers.  Outside the home were seven 3-4-foot-tall non-representational metal sculptures.  Some were painted bright colors and some were unfinished and were being allowed to oxidize.  To see a home with such a commitment to art really made me feel good. It was a moment away from tales of death and disease.  

My hope is that warmer weather will slow the impact of Covid 19.  My hope is that successful treatments for the disease will be developed. My particular hope is these medications or therapies will minimize the coronavirus’s impact on older people. Sometimes a walk in late spring lightens the spirit and makes these hopes seem more realistic.