Dear Yuri,
The window is clean. In this sparkling spring, the London winter had grimed the panes with a gritty layer, hazing the sun as it hoists itself over the houses that back on to our patch of suburban garden. But now, with a bit of effort, the glass is clear and the skies, pristine blue. Like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, I watch our neighbours’ panes crack open as the spring warmth slowly gathers; children gurgle and squeal in stereo from these spare bedrooms and back gardens.
The birds have been blissfully swooping, unaware, in our suburban patch. Blackbirds we know, old friends – today, too, green parakeets and many magpies, the odd woodpecker chasing grubs. The normally ceaseless Heathrow planes are almost silenced, but a whooping replacement catches my ear, my heart, beating fast, hoping it’s another parakeet. Yet knowing it’s the howl-howl-howl and wailing Doppler of the ambulances on another – surely – Covid mission up our local highstreet. I’m charting the pandemic with my ears by these paramedic dashes.
A window, though, is a two-way medium, a transparency. What do these parakeets and wood pigeons see through our windows as they wheel and dive? Had they sentient human brains, they would recognise the weight of pain and sorrow that, like a dammed pool, suddenly, without rational explanation, overbrims with some random additional sadness, a new, minimal scrap of pain.
What are we grieving for? The dead, unquestionably. But also, for what was, for the sheer human experience of life shared, joined up, embracing – together. Now we refocus our lives, framed by our few local streets, by these few panes of glass, and wonder if, when the spring has turned to summer, the other horizons, the ones we can’t see through those now clean windows, will be restored, changed. Or lost forever.