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Writer's picturecherylmurfin

The Brightest Bloom

Updated: May 4, 2021


Spring is fully upon us here in the Emerald City with cherry blossom petals turning the sidewalks pink, invasive Siberian Scilla taking over garden beds and public parks, and lilacs, in all their purpley aromatic splendor, busting out like popped corn.

The latter has been for me the One True and Holy Sign of spring since I was a teenager living in my great-grandmother’s house. How we looked forward to that first day each year when we opened the front door and were mercifully hit with the full fragrance of the lilac bush next to the porch. We’d finally outrun winter.


But just as magnificent as lilacs and the pink dogwoods just now coming into their glory, just as brilliant as the hot pink rhodies and shameless azaleas, just as awaited as the skunk cabbage and trillium, another radiant bloom has arrived: the maskless smiles of strangers.


Posie and I strolled this weekend in the Washington Park Arboretum. The smiles that greeted us on the trails were more than a sight for these sore eyes.

Accompanied by the sounds of laughter and by the sight of unrelated humans within spitting distance of each other, the smiles of about 15 senior women represented for me the out breath we’ve all been dying to release.


“Don’t you worry,” a tiny white-haired gal with a big graveley southern drawl trumpeted just as I was about to come upon the group taking a rest in the middle of the path.


“We’re ALL VACCINATED,” the entire group piped in. Like they’d practiced it.


I’d watched them coming up the path before they stopped. They marched along, veering toward this bush or that trunk like a flock of Canada geese, they were a living, breathing billboard to those fearful or skeptical of vaccine safety and/or efficacy. More than that, they were, for me, a first glance of the joy of truly arriving. The women didn’t carry a sign, but if they did, I feel sure it would have read: We Made It! Or, maybe, Be Not Afraid.


Before you start sending me all the science on variants and the percentages needed for herd immunity, which we are still far from achieving in the US at this writing, stop. Or, before you forward crushing videos of the chaos, and death that COVID-19 is now devastating India, don’t. I know. I know the pandemic is NOT over.


I track case trends like sports nuts follow stats. I understand it will be some time before this version of the word “pandemic” is shoved back into its Pandora’s box to lie in wait for the next ugly virus.


But to see those smiles! To see them in a group, on the faces of members of the population most devastated by this pandemic. My heart nearly leapt out of my chest.


It wasn’t just that I could see their smiles beneath shimmering eyes or that I saw virtually no stress on their faces or that this gaggle seemed so darn “normal” pointing at plants and flipping through plant guide books.


It was that they could see my smile too, that we smiled at each other freely fully, that I had no anxiety for them or myself.


It was that the CDC this week finally announced officially what scientists have known for a while but the public has been confused about. Being socially distanced outside without a mask is safe. Being outside in a group where all are fully vaccinated is more safe. It poses infinitesimally small to no risk.


Part of my heart burst lay in the fact that we, complete strangers, could connect and communicate in the way that humans are made to connect and communicate. We could relate through eyes unimpeded by creeping masks, through the sense of smell no longer cut off by two layers of cloth, through our mouths free to smile and be seen and be heard rather than muffled. It was the exchange of full facial expressions.


What got me was the simple fact that this group of elderly women, three of whom shared they’d been isolated in assisted living for months, could now gather not just as pairs six feet apart, but as a community close enough to feel each other’s warmth.


By now I’ve begun to forget the sense of connection that comes with gathering. Do you remember the energizing buzz of strangers elbow-to-elbow at a rock concert or movie theater? Or the thrill of thousands gathered for fireworks on a sunny 4th of July? Did we once gather 30 members of our family around the table for Thanksgiving?


Seeing elders reclaiming life en masse delivered me beyond hope into the sureness that we, as a nation and world, will soon arrive to a place beyond COVID. I will soon see my favorite artists play live. I will soon find myself sitting at family dining tables extended by end-to-end card tables.


I stopped so Posie could collect pets.


“We’re vaccinated too,” I trumpeted too, wondering if this will become our new way of greeting fellow humans. That I was also anointed by needle only made the smiles in the group wider.


“Isn’t this marvelous?” the ringleader beamed.

As I stood there unmasked, shooting the breeze about local flora and fauna rather than killer viruses, the sun came out over the trees and shined down on the path like a spotlight from heaven. The grass around us shined, the leaves shined, the blossoms shined, our bodies shined, suddenly illuminated in golden rays of light. Their smiles and mine did too, heralding the almost-but-not-yet-fully written end of this grim story:


“Stand close,” it will say. “Look me in the eyes, breathe the air I breathe, live outside of fear.”


If, for whatever reason, you can't and don't want to be vaccinated, I understand and I support your right to make the decision that's best for you. Vaccines are a deeply person question along with a communal question. I deal with it every day in my birth work.


But if you can, I hope you will. And then I hope you join some senior ladies under a warm, warm sun.







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