May 2020: "When There Were Trees and Poetry..."

Here we are, in the beginning of the month of May in the year 2020. The trees are gloriously alive. They ask no questions. They have no fear of what's coming... They are all innocence on May 2, 2020.

I feel like I'm dating these entries in a dramatic fashion, expecting that this blog might be found by some post-apocalyptic survivor living in a wild technobarbaric dystopian future world.

...Indeed, humanity passed through chaotic times in the twenty-first century. After the Pandemic came the Economic Meltdown followed by the War and... what the heck, we'll throw in a couple of asteroid collisions.

Things will have become pretty strange on planet earth by the time that kid-who-is-a-geek-with-ancient-tech somehow finds this "data," no doubt by rebelliously hacking into a restricted virtual storage vault. This information is "protected" by The Guides (that's what we'll call our spooky dictatorial oligarchy that rules the future).

Of course, my future illegal reader(!) wants details about the mythical global (or galactic?) catastrophe that began long ago, in the year 2020, when the first of the Great Plagues put earth into a quarantine. No one back then expected the terrors to come. But the reader will have to bear with me. These pages are early in the story.

It might be months or years before I desperately narrate the horrors: 'That laboratory was supposed to be shut down! What did they... Nooooo!! MUTANT EIGHT-HEADED SNAKES! They're COMING! Arrrghh!!!...' and then... nothing. The blog abruptly ends. But not yet. We're not even close to that part.

Today, I'm still naive. I know nothing of the dreadful things to come. Today is a beautiful Spring day. Today, I will wax poetic about trees. Trees? Future reader, do you still have trees?...

Gosh, that all sounds interesting. Maybe I should try writing science fiction. Or maybe I've just seen too many movies. But never mind all that. Right now, there's plenty to do in the beautiful outdoors, in our naturally socially distant neighborhood. I will gaze upon the trees, and listen to their poetry. Why not?

Those noble white kings of the forest, the sycamores and birch — the ones that stand luminous and majestic against the Winter sky — are not yet clothed with the leaves of Spring.

In a mix of woodland trees alive with blooming color and fresh vivid green, they tower like giants reaching for the clouds with bright bare branches, awakening more slowly to the Spring sun, among the last to be vested in the great green coats that spread long shadows of shade through the Summer.