A step in the right direction

Joni Mitchell is one of my all-time favorite songwriter / singers. One of her top hits is a song called Big Yellow Taxi. The refrain's first three lines are:

Don't it always seem to go 
That you don't know what you've got 
Till it's gone 

This morning I had that experience, after the fact, in reverse, sort of. For the first time in 15 or 18 months or so, the Better Half and I enjoyed special coffees at our favorite local coffee shop's outdoor patio. We hadn't been there since sometime around the beginning of the pandemic. Admittedly, we've been both careful and lucky and have avoided contracting COVID-19 and are each now fully vaccinated. Much of the effect of the pandemic on us has been more inconvenience than significant. Occasionally during the last year I've griped about missing the pleasures of visiting coffee shops, but it wan't until we were sitting in the sunny shade, making friends with an old basset hound and watching a pair of chipmunks dash through a stone wall that I realized just how much I missed what had effectively gone. I think the shop may have actually been closed for awhile during Minnesota's version of a "lockdown." In any  case, we'll do our best to get back to the patio more frequently now that we're "building back better."

coffee shop, Taylors falls

Photo by J. Harrington

If it's not clear, I don't accept that returning to what used to pass as "normal" is the way to go. We can, and must, do much better. Take a look at the Green New Deal resolution. It provides a framework for creating a sustainable, more just and equitable country and economy. It would help US move closer to the ideals on which we claim this country was founded. If we don't promptly mitigate and then eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, and concurrently adapt to the effects of the climate volatility we've already triggered, there's the prospect that life will become, quite literally, a living hell on earth. I doubt that even the Republicans really want something like that, but I've also been known to be wrong on occasion.

Darling Coffee

Meena Alexander - 1951-2018

The periodic pleasure
of small happenings
is upon us—
behind the stalls
at the farmer’s market
snow glinting in heaps,
a cardinal its chest
puffed out, bloodshod
above the piles of awnings,
passion’s proclivities;
you picking up a sweet potato
turning to me  ‘This too?’—
query of tenderness
under the blown red wing.
Remember the brazen world?
Let’s find a room
with a window onto elms
strung with sunlight,
a cafe with polished cups,
darling coffee they call it,
may our bed be stoked
with fresh cut rosemary
and glinting thyme,
all herbs in due season
tucked under wild sheets:
fit for the conjugation of joy.

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