Forty days and forty nights?

We're on the cusp of 40 days into the pandemic.
Periods of 40 days are significant in Earth’s creation stories.

• The book of Genesis states, “I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living thing I have made."
• After his baptism, Jesus was tempted by the devil for 40 days and nights in the Judaean Desert. Based on this, traditional Lent lasts for 40 days.
• Similar to Jesus, Buddha started his ministry fasting for 40 days and nights in the wilderness and was also tempted by evil spirits.
• Forty days was the period from the resurrection to the ascension of Jesus.
• According to some, Moses' life is divided into three 40-year segments: growing to adulthood, fleeing from Egypt; returning to Egypt to lead out his people.
• The 40th Day after death is a traditional memorial service in Islam with family gatherings, ceremonies and rituals in memory of the departed.

Forty days is also about how much staying at home people hoping to avoid Covid-19 can take before demanding “freedom” – even the freedom to suffocate in one’s own coronavirus-congested lungs.
About 40 days into the pandemic:

• Rifle-carrying Trumpies inside Michigan’s state legislature demanded freedom. 
• Conspiracy theorists protested stay-at-home orders claiming that COVID-19 is a hoax and a “dry run for communism.”
• Conservative and/or remote California counties defied stay-at-home orders.
• Californians crowded beaches.
• South African township dwellers rebelled.

Infections are growing in South Africa. Confirmed number of infections today: 6,783.
In Cape Town’s crowded townships such as Khayelitsha, Nyanga and Langa infections increased by up to 173 percent last week, and in some cases shot up by well over 20 percent a day.
The Western Cape now has about 45 percent of South Africa’s confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths.
Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal townships are defying orders, too, saying lockdown is impossible.

I talked on the phone with our gardener, locked down in Mpophemeni Township with his wife and two young children.
“It’s terrible! Terrible!” he said. “Police driving up and down the road all the time. Go out the house to buy food and they stop you. Shouting, shouting, always shouting.”
The good news is he knows of no cases of infection in his part of the township. While his relationship to gardening is not passionate – gardening is just a job where he can arrive late, leave early, and eat well in-between – he sounded almost wistful for weeds.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

First Monday of the month and I drove into town to fill another prescription, drop off homemade cotton masks at a children’s center, and buy giblets for dogs.
Crowds of people lined the streets, particularly in a section of town lined with several banks. The crowd shown here, snapped as I drove past, is a fragment of the line along the street waiting for ATM service.
After I saw these crowds, I elected to drop off masks and buy giblets later in the week.

I spent the rest of the day eradicating pond weed then recycling it as another layer for my weed-smothering path under swamp cypress.


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