We saw this remarkable thing about a week ago when we took a hike in Manitoba's Spirit Sands park. At first I thought it was a hummingbird flitting from flower to flower except that it was tiny and beige coloured and it had two long black antennae. At the restaurant that evening I googled descriptions for clues and discovered we’d seen a type of moth.

That was all I was going to write about that, except that later the same day I read the New York Times article titled “How Humanity Unleashed a Flood of New Diseases” and went to bed disheartened. I know about climate change, systemic racism, and the growing income inequality and yet what seems to be happening right now is that these things are coming into clearer and clearer focus. If previously it had been fine to move through life with only a vague, even somewhat dismissive, sense of these things it is no longer the case. Surviving the pandemic will be a minor detail compared to the uncertainties that will reach tendril-like into our homes.

That is why, taking a hike as a family into a landscape that can still be enjoyable feels like a limited pleasure, a thing slipped under the wire.