A deserted DUMBO, where my sister and her family are in isolation.

It has been more than a month and I have been to town only once, to mail some packages. I live in the country, where the stay-at-home order does not feel so confining, only strange. And sad. To live inside a circle of life, watching the seasons turn, apart from history, which comes to us on the radio not like a distant foghorn, but like a blaring siren inside our living room. I cannot shut it off. I talk with family members almost everyday who are sheltering inside their Brooklyn apartment, all of them sick, and feel as if my hands were bound. I would endure this time of seclusion with more grace if I did not feel so useless, so removed from the overflowing hospitals and the city of my childhood where so many are sick and dying.

We are boiling sap on our woodstove as we do every year, planting seeds indoors for this year’s vegetable and flower gardens. The end of winter always comes slowly, but this year time is distended, fraught by strangeness and necessary hope. We had a few days when the sun was out, the crocuses up and early daffodils; we turned over the compost piles and cleaned up winter’s debris. And then a cold rain came, falling to the earth like so may thrust spears. More darkness, more winter.

For a long time I associated spring with death because my mother died in spring, and so did my brother. We held his memorial in Washington DC, where he lived, while the cherry trees were in bloom. The magnificence of color hurt my eyes; I blinkered through the lengthening days in my grief. After so many years, this association has faded a little. But we will never forget this time, all the burials, the intensity with which we watched for the lilacs to leaf out, listened for the song of the white throated sparrow, waited for permission to resume our lives again.

Usually at this time of year we are lambing on our farm. But we chose not to do this anymore, at least for a while. I did not know, of course, when we made that decision, that come spring, we would be forced to stay at home; that this would be a time when new life would have brought much-needed delight. More life. I look out at the paddock where I should see tiny lambs standing beneath their wooly mothers, their little tails trembling, while the ewes raise their chins into the air, as if whistling a familiar tune. I miss them.

I chose this life because I have never had much confidence in a precarious, bloated economy of global supply chains, credit default swaps, technological dependency, two-thousand-cow dairies, and over-specialization. Instead, it is the rhythms of a rural life –collecting sap in buckets, cutting wood for the stove, caring for animals – that are more reliable. When everything else is failing, these do not fail us, cannot fail us. John Berger wrote that when the animals are gone, it will be “their endurance we [will] miss.” An old ewe dies, but she has “already lambed her permanence.” It was the same ewe, forever and forever, her milk flowing into eternity, the lambs arriving year after year. Animals, who have always been with us, are our link to the past before the past. By caring for them, for the soil and the forests, the carbon and nitrogen cycles and the rain, we are keeping forever alive and this is surely not useless.

Spring will be here soon.

The good news is that CSA subscriptions and farm stand sales have doubled in recent weeks. Local food, honestly grown, is something we can trust, and if we want our farms to be there when we need them, we better support them now. Meanwhile, the mega-dairies are dumping milk as prices are in freefall. I am reminded of those images from the Great Depression of mountains of surplus grain, farmers burning corn and, yes, dumping milk by the roadsides. These became our symbols of the cruelty and insanity of unbridled capitalism, of allowing the Invisible Hand to control our lives and to grab us by the throat. The Vermont legislature is considering emergency rules for putting a floor on milk prices – so that prices don’t go below a farmer’s cost of production – and for distributing milk surpluses to kids, food pantries, and shelters. These were the kinds of policies put in place by the New Deal, and over the decades since have been dismantled chip by chip. And here we are again.

It is hard to see how we will ever go back to the way things were. Putting a floor on milk prices so a farmer doesn’t lose money by working seven days a week to feed us, and buying agricultural surpluses to feed the hungry – is this something that will ever make sense not to do? Will we go back to mass evictions of poor black single mothers and their children? Throw the homeless back on the streets? Can our system of medical apartheid really continue after this? This pandemic has made visible to all the faults in the system, the gross inequalities, so that they can no longer be denied.

The other day Art was looking through some boxes for some old photographs and found a newspaper clipping from 1979: “Use of fossil fuels called threat to world climate.” The story appeared on page D1 of the New York Times. Even a magazine printed a few weeks ago arrives in our mailbox as if it were sent to us from a distant past, as did this newspaper clip. The world before corona. I worry that the climate threat is once again pushed back to page D1, although we know now that the effects of fossil fuel burning will not wait two hundred years, as the professor thought in 1979. That they are already here, and that climate change will bring more pandemics, more economic disaster, and will kill many people. We will have to reckon with the knowledge that, once again, it is only in times of economic contraction that emissions decline.

I worry that the climate threat will always be pushed back to page D1 because there is always an immediate crisis, because people need to eat, to work, to live, while the earth is more and more diminished and ecologically disturbed, meaning that there will be more crises, more unmet needs. A forest, writes David Quammen, “with its vast diversity of visible creatures and microbes, is like a beautiful old barn: knock it over with a bulldozer and viruses will rise in the air like dust.” We have been warned.

Friends and family members tell me they are rereading those plague-themed books, like Camus’ La Peste, and Love in the Time of Cholera. I am rereading Angels in America, and grieving for the millions who died of AIDS while the world was indifferent. We did not, as a collective, stand in our doorways to bang pots and pans at seven o’clock. The stars did not go out, we did not pack up the moon and dismantle the sun. I want to believe that the near universal solidarity we are living right now will not fade away, that it will change us, deepen our powers of empathy; that the circumference of our sphere of care will expand in time and space, to include the past, the far away, the seventh generation, the neighbor we never knew. The animals, too, who are our permanence, our forever.