The summer of COVID-19 fed my soul, but it broke my heart

Beverly Beckham

The Boston Globe

What I will remember about the summer of COVID-19 are pleasures denied. Hugging. Eating out. Visiting friends. Traveling. Singing. Going to concerts and plays. Sports. Crowds. Trains. Planes. Movies. The laughter of strangers. Lunches and dinner parties. All the freedoms that were part of every summer before this one.

But what I will also remember about the summer of COVID-19 are the unexpected pleasures: the clarity of the air, the freshness even on the hottest of days. This summer, Massachusetts’ air has been like Maine air, a just-scrubbed clean that has made not being able to go to Maine almost OK.

I will also remember sitting on my deck and breathing in this air not for a few, stolen minutes because I had someplace to go. But for hours sometimes, because I had no place to go. So I sat and watched — on nights when I would have been too busy to watch — the sun slipping away, the light of it always different: pink, orange, white, purple, gray. Sometimes, no sun at all, the clouds thick, the day simply getting dimmer and dimmer.

I will remember, too, the rabbits, one big and one small in my backyard munching on clover since June. Every night there they are, along with a family of groundhogs that live under our shed. I counted seven groundhogs once, chomping away at weeds, vines, anything green. I’ve seen all of them side by side, silently grazing. One night a skunk joined the group. The rabbits scurried. The groundhog just kept on chomping.

I will remember that in the summer of COVID-19, my husband bought bird feeders, not the Job Lot inexpensive kind we had and were content with before the pandemic. But two super-deluxe birds-do-not-live-by-bread-alone, upscale squirrel-proof, pricey feeders. “The squirrels are eating all the food, not the birds,” my husband announced one day early in the summer, having sat and studied them for hours. Man, even in the midst of a pandemic, needs a purpose. My husband had clearly found his.

It became his mission, then, not to starve the squirrels or torment them, but simply to impede them in their pursuit of what clearly is their happiness, a curious pursuit considering (I read this online) that squirrels are not fussy eaters. They like corn, mushrooms, squash, broccoli, apples, oranges, apricots, and avocados. So why do they choose to shinny up a 10-foot pole, fling themselves through the air, contort their bodies, lose their balance, plummet to the ground, and do this again and again, all to score a few dry, tiny, tasteless seeds? It does not make sense.

Before my husband bought new, deluxe feeders, he, of course, tried squirrel proofing the old ones. But neither cayenne pepper nor greasing the poles deterred them. (He read how to torture squirrels on Google.) Anyway, determined to outwit these tree-dwelling rodents — weeks of watching reruns of the Red Sox seemed to have turned besting a squirrel into a sport — he bought himself not one but two top-of-the-line squirrel-proof bird feeders, which ranked high in customer satisfaction, because clearly watching squirrels be stymied by plexiglass and/or spun into space by a motorized bird feeder suffices as entertainment in our COVID-19 world.

All this would have been lost on me in any other summer. My horizons, I guess, have been widened.

And yet, I don’t want this forever. I don’t want it for one more day. I want the kids to be able to go to school without fear. I want them to go to theater and choir practice and to play soccer, which I don’t even like. I want to hear live music. I want to crowd into the Napoleon Room at Boston’s Club Café with friends I haven’t seen in months. I want to wait in a long line at Sullivan’s on Castle Island, talking to the person in front of me and behind me, as we wait for our lobster rolls. I want Maine, the real thing.

I want theater and sports and racing to catch a train. I want what everyone wants. I want to go back to before.

I miss strangers. I miss friends. I miss making plans. I miss birthdays and christenings and weddings and funerals. I miss hugging people. And I miss being hugged.

I bought flowers this summer. Lots of them. I watered them every day and they flourished. And part of me flourished, too. But another part of me didn’t.

This is what I will remember about the summer of COVID-19: It fed my soul, but it broke my heart.