This morning I photographed the tiny pokeweed blooming on the edge of our driveway. I was walking back from taking the trash out, and I had my head down, watching for puddles.
Pokeweed is usually a bushy, expansive plant, growing and sprawling into every inch of available space: an opportunistic weed. It grows everywhere, bearing bright green leaves and inconspicuous white flowers with green centers that eventually ripen into purple-black berries on hot pink stems.
Pokeweed is a showy, eye-grabbing plant that is photogenic at every stage of development–one of my favorite weeds. But the pokeweed growing next to our driveway is less than ankle-high: a sprout hoping nobody notices it is there, unobtrusively doing its weedy thing.
I know this poke won’t last the summer: J will trim or uproot it when it gets too tall. But in the meantime, it is doing what weeds everywhere do. Having sprouted, I presume, from a seed excreted by a bird sitting on the fence, this miniature pokeweed is growing as tall as a slender strip of soil between the fence and pavement permits while furtively following the advice to Bloom Where You’re Planted.
The start of August is the beginning of the end for college instructors. My semester starts on September 1, so I finally need to get to the business of preparing my classes. This time last year, I had no idea what teaching during a pandemic would actually look like: in a cloud of uncertainty, I designed my classes so they could function entirely online if necessary, figuring that any in-person classes we could manage would be icing on the pedagogical cake.
This year, we’d assumed or hoped that Fall would be different. In the Vaccinated Times, we believed we’d all be back on campus together, maskless in full classrooms, the threat of sickness and death behind us. As Spring semester ended in May, we all looked toward Fall for a return to Almost Normal.
Now, though, the future is once again uncertain. Will vaccines alone be enough to keep students in crowded classrooms and full residence halls safe? Are we ready–really–to return to the Petri dish version of college, where students start falling ill with colds, flu, and unidentified illness a few weeks into the semester, then circulate said ailments among their sleep-deprived peers for the rest of the semester before bringing all manner of germs home for Thanksgiving, only to return to campus with a fresh set of bugs exchanged over family gatherings?
In the Before Times, I’d regularly come to class with pocket packs of tissues and an assortment of cough drops, distributing both to my sniffling, sneezing, and coughing students. (Students sick from the other end were on their own.) Sickness rages like proverbial wildfire on college campuses, bred and spread in the close quarters of classrooms, cafeterias, and dorm rooms. Are we really ready to return to that part of the Before Times?
In the face of the Delta variant, rising COVID cases nationwide, and the disheartening reality of breakthrough infections, I find myself quietly planning my own worst-case contingencies.
Hoarded Ordinaries 