Overlapping flowers strike a sense of spring into my eyes walking around Evanston, by now more than half-used to my town’s half-abandoned feel. Storefronts stand empty—we lost a lot of retail before the shutdown in a kind of prolepsis—and restaurants limp along selling takeout; cars are few, bicyclists increasingly common, birdsong is audible most hours of the day. Squint and everything resembles a kind of paradise—the future is lapsed and the past unreachable, so the present stretches into its bad infinity. Trees, birds, and flowers mark space with their colors, their sounds, their pollen. The season is our only time.