The ripeness is all, the ripening of isolation and the bloom of fantasy, giving way once in a great while to something like contact, heading out early on the first morning of May to be dazzled by high blossoms lining streets and crowding courtyards, Chicago itself a kind of flower bobbing on a branch, with its denizens walking their dogs, resembling dogs in the way a mask covers and flattens the jaw and chops of the face. There are moments in which the pandemic achieves something like irrelevance. Homecoming like that of sailors, borne up by the sea of spring.