Chris S. Rohwer and his wife Robin Moore Rohwer are valued contributors to Knox TN Today. Chris is an outstanding photographer and Robin a talented painter. Their work appears each Thursday in our Arts 865 section.
Recently, Chris sent us the note below.
“Just to see something different, Robin and I went for a drive through some of the Halls area last night. I noticed the subdivisions are packed full of people walking, riding bikes, playing by the creek, playing basketball, all kinds of things. Reminds me of how we grew up in small-town USA.
“Haven’t seen that for years, as usually, the kids are all off at the ballfield, looking at a screen or something. Kind of neat if you ask me. I heard a commentator say a couple of weeks ago that 20 years from now[if] you ask a 26-year-old the best time of their life… they will tell you back when there was this weird virus my parents stayed home and we did all kinds of fun things around the house.”
It’s too easy these days to feel that life is crumbling at our feet. The pandemic has taken thousands of lives and altered thousands more in seemingly irreparable ways. This waking nightmare has left us groping in the dark, searching for a light to lead us back to the way things were.
The words Chris wrote should remind us that life – joyful life – remains beneath the pall that sickness and death have cast over the world. Humans are nothing if not resilient, and we need only scratch the surface of sorrow and isolation to get assurance that we can and will go on.
The poet Sylvia Plath wrote:
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
Thank you, Chris, for lifting your eyes to remind us the pandemic has not robbed us of the sights and sounds of happiness, only made us appreciate them more than ever.
Larry Van Guilder is the business/government editor for Knox TN Today.