The empty city

I've been walking. Not anywhere in particular. In the mornings before work and again at five, after I've talked to my mother, I put on my shoes and go out, because the alternative is the kitchen table, and I've spent enough time with the kitchen table.

The city is empty in a way I'll never see again, I hope. Broadway on a weekday at noon, with nobody on it. The bus going by with two people aboard, sitting as far apart as the bus allows. Restaurants with chairs stacked on the tables and handwritten signs in the windows that started out saying "Back soon" and now just say "Thank you." I walked downtown one Sunday and stood in the middle of a street I used to have to wait three light changes to cross, and I could hear a flag rattling on a pole a block away.

Volunteer Park is where I go most. It's busier than the streets, but everyone walks a wide arc around everyone else, nodding, like people passing in a hallway at a funeral. The rhododendrons came out anyway, enormous and pink and indifferent, and it's been strange to see them so lovely in a spring when nobody can enjoy anything properly.

And there are the crows. There have always been crows here, but I never paid much attention to them until now, when they're the busiest thing on the street. They walk down the middle of the sidewalk as if they've been waiting years for us to get out of the way. There's a pair that sits on the wire outside my building in the mornings and watches me leave. I've started saying good morning to them. I'm aware of how that sounds.

Someone at the university here did a famous study, years ago, where researchers in masks caught and banded crows, and for years afterward the crows would scold anyone who walked by in those masks, and teach their young to do it too. They remember faces. They hold grudges. They tell each other. I think about that every time I walk past my two on the wire with my own face half covered. I hope they've decided I'm all right.

I don't know what the city will be like when this is over. I don't know if anything will be the way it was. But I've seen it this spring with nobody in it, and I've learned the name of every street between here and the lake, and which house has the dog that barks at everyone except me. I'd like to keep walking like this, after, though I suspect I won't.

What have you noticed this spring that you'd never have seen otherwise?