I've discovered joy in a graveyard. My most peaceful and life-affirming moments are walking along the assorted paths of Greenwood Cemetery, among the trees, flowers and assorted headstones, monuments, mausoleums, and plaques. With robins hopping and tweeting, occasional herons, and a lone smiley face deflated balloon that someone left tied to a tombstone.

It's an odd-feeling walking there alone in the evening hours as the sun wanes in the sky...still bright but not quite so bright, mask just below my nostrils, until I hear voices rumbling in the distance, or see a walker coming towards me, eyes glued on their cell phone - and up the mask goes...And I find myself wondering why they are looking at their cell phones in such paradise? Is this why the pandemic strikes? Because we've grown so bored of the natural world - our eyes are glued to a screen - until that is literally all we see? I don't know. For myself, taking a break from the screens, the phones, and all of it - feels kind of like bricks falling off shoulders or a veil lifted from the eyes. Sure I raise my phone to capture images here and there - to share later on various social media platforms, this one among them, but that feels different somehow.

The breeze is crisp on the portion of the face uncovered by the mask. I'm like a bandit- only my eyes and the top of my nose are visible and barely underneath my sunglasses, which are slid quite close to my nostrils. This is to keep them from fogging up from the mask. My breath comes heavy against layers of cloth, a filter between them. Lowering the mask slightly beneath the nostrils when it becomes evident that I am alone, just me, the trees, and the birds, comes almost as a relief - but not quite enough of one to lower it all the way down.

The mask is a reminder of how fragile I am in this brave new world - where a disease could lurk in any or all human contact. The trees, the birds, the grass, the petals, the flowers, the graves are safe and my friends, but the lone human, potentially deadly. We circle around each other on the paths and sidewalks. Walking on grass or the street to avoid accidental contact. Some will see me - and go another direction or path if watching. If not, I'm the one who darts in another direction or path. On the way, a man with a handmade bandana mask, asks in a thick accent where Ocean Parkway is, he looks lost - and I point, stating it's right here, behind him.

They've opened more streets to pedestrian traffic. And established more bike lanes across the city. The neighbors are complaining about how - the streets are now crowded with teens and children, not their own, making a ruckus on skate-boards and scooters and bikes, treating it like their own personal playground. I tell this to my mother over the phone - in one of our daily phone chats - and she points out the obvious, the kids have no where else to play. I avoid the newest opened streets knowing that many will flock there and go instead to the far less crowded and peaceful grave yard - which alas, will only be packed this weekend - on Memorial day, when everyone makes time to visit the graves. And people have been visiting the graves. I see fresh leavings, tributes really, from the living to the dead - who I sense, while they do not, are no longer present. Merely the ghosts of long-shed or in the case of the newly dead, ever present grief lurks there now in the flags, balloons, plastic flowers, and crosses dotting the newly marked headstones and graves, alongside the ancient ones from a century past that sit faded, unremarked upon.

I wonder sometimes as I walk these pathways if this is my way of making peace with death?

The death of what I know. With my own mortality, and more importantly the death of those I love - which are a mere handful. I fear my own death less than theirs.

And death lurks in the shadows and the sunlight now (although less so the sunlight or so I'm told)..and in the unseen places, it's sting, invisible and deadly and closer than before. It lurks outside my doorway. In the steel furniture carrier that sits outside my neighbor's door, on the plastic bag of balloons welcoming a new life in big broad letters just beyond it, on the door handles of the front doors to my building, and on the mailboxes. On each piece of mail and every box delivered. On the innocent old black lady's face as she struggles with a cart down the street, mask less. Or the old man smoking outside the gas station wheezing between puffs of smoke, mask down below his chin. And finally on the woman and her family, walking her ever so slowly towards me on the sidewalk, none of which are wearing masks today.

According to the COVID MAP OF DOOM which I've been consulting since I discovered it in late January, prior to that I was consulting the New York Times Map (which isn't as accurate)...there are now 1.5 Million "confirmed" cases of COVID-19 in the United States, and 90,338 deaths. I'd been waiting for it to drift above 90,000...and predict it will be well above 100,000 by midsummer. The US doesn't have accurate testing in most places. Texas is horrible, and Florida not much better. New York has the most accurate testing of anyone - mainly because they gave up on WHO and the CDC early on, and developed their own tests via various pharmaceutical and testing labs. They did it in desperation - because the CDC and WHO wouldn't provide them with any tests when they requested them in early February. So they developed their own test for FDA approval,and then, went ahead and did their own testing all too aware of the lengthy lag time for results - too terrified to wait much longer. Then they waited to reveal their results once they got it approved. I remember this because I thought it to be hilarious at the time, and still do. My gallows humor is in full force at the moment.

The numbers don't feel real...not people just symbols on a screen, ever rising..and yet, I know they are, people, and real as you or me. And it's...how to explain? Like watching a rip tide, soaked in blood, drift closer and closer towards me. I know as the numbers climb, it is only a matter of time, before I too am touched by this disease. And it strikes me that everyone else must feel the same - watching the waves as they skip back just out of reach and try to pull their loved ones with them. Rip tides, I was told as a swimmer, can take you without warning, pulling the strongest swimmers under the current. And I remember all too well watching my father almost get pulled out by one as a wee child - while he was attempting to save a drowning man. After that, my parents kept us towards the shallow end and always within sight. That's what this feels like in a way, we're all standing knee deep in the waves, skipping back as the riptide comes closer and closer to shore.

We don't know if my niece has it or not. She's sick, but not severely so. Or so I'm told. It's hard to know from so far away. Cedar. That's her name, by the way - named after a tree. She is a mere twig of a thing, skinny and tall, all arms and legs, and copper hair and almond shaped eyes, and a pixie's smile. Long legs. A Swimmer. A runner. A poet with a camera. She just finished her last paper for the semester - it was on Greek Philosophy. And she dreams of being a human rights activist, and going to Columbia University, traveling the world with her camera. A mere sixteen years of age, and her eyes bright with hope on the future. The last time I saw her was a mere eight months ago. It feels like years now. And as I wait for results...from the tests she took, I tell myself it may be mono, or maybe even if it is COVID-19, it's a mild case. Most people, recover, right? Right? Right?

Rip-tides don't take everyone. Just the occasional swimmer here and there. Random. You step in and it pulls you out to sea. Drowning you. A force of a nature. Mysterious. Yet we've studied it. We understand. We know to take the right precautions. And still...it occurs. Like sharks. And jellyfish. And deadly disease.

So, here I am walking through cemeteries, communing with trees and making my peace such as it is with death, ever lurking beyond each horizon.