Last spring, some weeks after surgery, my friend A-M and I visited the Baltimore Museum of Art to view an exhibition on Joan Mitchell. I was still using a walking cane and bored with making rounds through the kitchen, TV room, and library. Despite the blanket of wool and pain relievers beneath which I slept, I wrestled with various anxieties—personal, professional, political—a “three-P cocktail” guaranteed to induce Gloria Swanson-like swooning. My husband, ever a patient caretaker, more than deserved a break …

Fear and beauty make odd bedfellows.

So I wrote in March of 2020 as Covid-19 spread across the globe and everything turned upside down and inside out. I remember the incongruity of a lone magnolia bush on a cobalt blue day: though I admired the magenta petals and budding shoots, they felt dissonant in the face of so much death and unknowing.

During a recent walk I noticed a hornet’s nest in a neighbor’s yard, its size proof of the industry that had occurred beneath the leafy canopy of warmer months. Whether the hornets had toiled away quietly or amid the discordant hum of their own labor, I cannot say. Hornets are not popular in suburbia. That they’d managed to persevere at all alongside wary citizens, leaf blowers, and pesticides was an accomplishment.