Good Lord, what a gray, still day.

Sometime yesterday afternoon Red Pants came and got his little black device. Michael’s right. He was probably recording the birds, who were very loud in the emptiness usually filled by the rattle of cables, the hum of cars.

They were loud yesterday, anyway. Not a peep right now. Not a black speck of a bird in the sky. Not a leaf stirring in the treetops down the street. If it weren’t for the single car I see slowly climbing the hill in the distance, I could be looking at a photograph.

I wish now I’d gone up to the roof yesterday, when the sky was blue.

Aha! He’s back! Wearing black sweatpants this morning, and this time he’s set the dark rectangle on a different part of the roof, though still near the street. Now that I have a better view, it looks more like an Ipad or a laptop computer than a radio. He turns to walk away, dialing a cellphone and raising it to his ear. Bye-bye Mr. Sweatpants!

I listen carefully. Yes, I can hear birds after all. Just not as loud and raucous as they were yesterday.

Now that I have a sense of when I’ll be able to access healthcare without risking bankruptcy, the three weeks until May 1st seem terribly long. Can I stay healthy until then? At least if the lock-down ends in May, I won’t be quite as afraid of going back to work in the office downtown. Which right now seems like an impossible dream.

Years ago when I worked for Waldenbooks in Greensboro, one of my co-workers told me about how she had gone through a terrible illness. She was young and strong, but got knocked flat by a virus that almost killed her. She told me that while she was sick and confined to her bed, she felt so horrible for so long that she stopped believing she’d ever been well. Maybe it was the pain, or maybe it was the high fever, but she literally thought there had never been any other world for her but the weak, nauseated, head-pounding, hard-to-breathe present.

On colorless days like this, I can’t believe I ever had the option of leaving this apartment. I never went for my weekly walk down Polk Street to the Marina Pier, never hiked all the way to Cole Valley or climbed through the gardens of Telegraph Hill. Michael and I never took Muni Metro to go to a movie at the Castro Theater. We never rode out to the avenues for broth dumplings. I never spent an evening listening to the marathon Moby Dick readings at the Maritime Museum.

The opposite was true yesterday, when the sun was out, the sky was bright, and I had work to do for the library. At the end of the day, as I fixed dinner, I had to remind myself that I had not actually gone in to work but had done everything at my desk here. That’s the difference a blue sky out my window can make.