Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.
Day One Hundred Twenty
In my youth, growing up in the Lost Quarter, we battled another plague: the round leaf mallow. A weed as merciless as the grippe reborn.
Though common in other parts of the Quarter it was unknown where I was raised. How it arrived was unclear, though there were an untold number of vectors for the seeds. The clothes of visitors, the trucks of those picking up or delivering cattle, the animals themselves. Looked at that way its coming was as inevitable as the dread lord’s invasion of the Quarter. People are always coming and going everywhere, carrying who knows what with them.
The first year we noticed one or two in the pens and around the yard. An unfamiliar plant in amongst the usual weeds: kochia, dandelion, and thistle. How it had come to be there we had no idea. It grew low to the ground, spreading out with viney stalks topped by a ‘round’ leaf that looks like a poorly drawn heart. We thought nothing of it. There were always weeds and grass growing everywhere in the yard and around the corrals, and this was just one more.
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