But to say that times of plague only bring out the bestial and diabolical side of human nature is too simplistic. It seems to me that we are making up “human nature” as we go along. “Very little in history is inevitable,” Margaret Atwood wrote. To accept the demonization of the marginalized as inevitable is to give up on the whole human enterprise. What happened to the Jewish residents of Stuttgart and Lansberg and so many other places was not inevitable. It was a choice.

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Amid the horrors of the Black Death, Ibn Battuta tells us a story of people coming together in the city of Damascus. He says that people fasted for three consecutive days, then “assembled in the Great Mosque until it was filled to overflowing . . . and spent the night there in prayers. . . . After the dawn prayers the next morning, they all went out together on foot, holding Qurans in their hands, and the amirs barefoot. The procession was joined by the entire population of the town, men and women, small and large; the Jews came with their Book of the Law and the Christians with their Gospel, all of them with their women and children. The whole concourse, weeping and seeking the favor of God through His books and His prophets, made their way to the Mosque of the Footprints, and there they remained in supplication and invocation until near midday. They then returned to the city and held the Friday service, and God lightened their affliction.”

In Ibn Battuta’s story, even the powerful went barefoot in a statement of equality, and all the people came together in prayer regardless of their religious background. Of course, whether this mass gathering really slowed the spread of the plague in Damascus is unclear—but we see in this account that crisis does not always bring out the cruelty within us. It can also push us toward sharing our pains and hopes and prayers, and treating each other as equally human. And when we respond that way, perhaps the affliction is lightened. While it is human nature to blame and demonize others in miserable times, it is also human nature to walk together, the leaders as barefoot as the followers.

The residents of Damascus left us a model for how to live in this precedented now. As the poet Robert Frost put it, “The only way out is through.” And the only good way through is together. Even when circumstances separate us—in fact, especially when they do—the way through is together.

I am highly suspicious of attempts to brightside human suffering, especially suffering that—as in the case of almost all infectious diseases—is unjustly distributed. I’m not here to criticize other people’s hope, but personally, whenever I hear someone waxing poetic about the silver linings to all these clouds, I think about a wonderful poem by Clint Smith called “When people say, ‘we have made it through worse before.’” The poem begins, “all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones / of those who did not make it.” As in Ibn Battuta’s Damascus, the only path forward is true solidarity—not only in hope, but also in lamentation.

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My daughter recently observed that when it’s winter, you think it will never again be warm, and when it’s summer, you think it will never again be cold. But the seasons go on changing anyway, and nothing that we know of is forever—not even this.

Plague is a one-star phenomenon, of course, but our response to it need not be.

WINTRY MIX

THERE’S A KAVEH AKBAR POEM that begins, “it’s been January for months in both directions,” and it really has been. I can remember in the abstract how it feels to wear a T-shirt, to feel sweat dripping down the bridge of my nose as I pull weeds in the garden. But I cannot bring to mind the actual feeling of sun on my skin now, as I pull up the withered pepper and tomato plants, trying to keep my back to the lip-cracking wind. I should’ve done this months ago, when the temperatures were milder and the plants equally dead. But I put everything off, even the purported leisure of gardening.

For quite a while here in Indianapolis, the only answer to “Why is the sky blue?” has been that it isn’t blue. I keep thinking about a line from a Mountain Goats song, “The gray sky was vast and real cryptic above me.”

There’s a phrase in literary analysis for our habit of ascribing human emotions to the nonhuman: the pathetic fallacy, which is often used to reflect the inner life of characters through the outer world, as when Keats in “Ode on Melancholy” writes of a “weeping cloud,” or Shakespeare in Julius Caesar refers to “threatening clouds.” Wordsworth writes of wandering “lonely as a cloud.” In Emily Dickinson’s poetry, sometimes the clouds are curious, other times mean. Clouds separate us from the sun when we need shade, but they also separate us from the sun when we need light. They are, like the rest of us, quite context-dependent.

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I started gardening because my therapist recommended it. She said it might be helpful to me, and it has been. Although I am not a particularly good gardener (the average tomato I successfully harvest costs about seventeen dollars), I like having my hands in the dirt and watching seeds sprout. But the most valuable thing about gardening for me is that before I began growing vegetables, I always dreamt of having a proper nemesis, and now I have one. She is a groundhog—an astonishingly rotund groundhog that waddles into my garden whenever she pleases and eats a wide variety of crops, from soybeans to sweet peppers. Wikipedia tells me that groundhogs in the wild can expect to live six years at the most, but my nemesis has been alive and consuming the garden I cultivate for her for at least eight years.

She lives about twenty-five feet from the edge of the garden, beneath a tiny wooden shed where I store garden tools. Sometimes, I will watch from the deck off the back of my office as she digs beneath the fence my dad and I built to keep the groundhog out. I will shout at the groundhog from the lime-green Adirondack chair where I’m trying to write. I’ll get out of the chair and start walking toward her, at which point she will look up toward me with absolute disdain before moseying back beneath the fence to her home.

And then five or ten minutes later, I’ll look up and see her enjoying soybeans. She knows I am unwilling to kill her, and she knows I lack the intelligence to groundhog-proof the garden, and so she lives on into an impossible old age, eating a wondrous array of fresh, organic fruits and vegetables.

You need a sense of purpose to get through life. The groundhog has given me one. But now, it is winter, early 2020, and she is hibernating. It has been January for months in both directions, and I, of course, do not know what is coming.

As I belatedly haul the tomato cages and beanpoles out of the garden and into the shed, I make sure to stomp quite loudly in the hopes of disturbing the groundhog’s slumber. It takes forever to stack the tomato cages with my half-numb fingers, and I’m cursing and muttering to myself about how if I’d only done this in November, I wouldn’t be here.

Then why not just put it off longer, I ask myself. Why not just go home and make some coffee and watch something empty and delicious on TV while the kids run heavy-footed around the house? Because I wanted time to myself, and at my age, this is how you get it.

* * *

When I finish stacking the tomato cages, I walk back to the garden. It begins to spit frozen rain—or not exactly frozen rain. Here in Indianapolis, there is a common weather phenomenon known as “wintry mix.” Precipitation will shift from sleet to snow to rain and then back again. Sometimes we get these weird tiny pellets of snow called graupel.*

Snow is beautiful, almost ridiculously picturesque as it wafts down and blankets the ground, bringing with it a beatific quiet. Wintry mix is radically unromantic, as nicely captured by the word graupel. Wintry mix is a thoroughly Midwestern form of precipitation: practical, unlovely, and unpretentious.

* * *

As I pile withered bean bushes into the wheelbarrow, I feel like the sky is spitting on me. I think of Wilson Bentley, the amateur photographer from Vermont who became the first person to take a close-up photograph of a snowflake in 1885. Bentley went on to photograph more than five thousand snowflakes, which he called “ice flowers” and “tiny miracles of beauty.”

Nobody ever called graupel a tiny miracle of beauty, and obviously, I don’t love being pelted by tiny balls of freezing rain or having sleet lash at me from seemingly impossible angles as it blows across the flat and unbroken misery of an Indiana field. And yet . . . I do kind of like wintry mix. It’s one of the ways I know that I’m home.

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