Animals of October

I mentioned a few posts ago about the re-discovery of local green spaces during the first lockdown. Remember those heady days in late March? When the cold was leaving us and the rolling ticker of infection numbers was driving ever-upwards in dizzying amounts? When masks were a novelty and we all had to relearn how to wash our hands? It seems and feels like centuries ago. There was a strange luminescence to those days, even amongst all the horror of an encroaching pandemic. Our houses seemed to strain with the burden of being excessively lived-in, we became suddenly more attentive about the dullest of things: the shopping experience, the new possibilities of home-based workdays and homeschooling. And then there was this curious reconnecting with nature, our one and only constant friend. The one-hour-of-exercise-a-day mandate came echoing down the pipes as if offered by the coronavirus itself as a sort of partial ceasefire. Among the gloom, we caught glimpses of silver linings in the sh...