Travel fast head down
don't breathe in when passing hikers
there's a bug going round
between late afternoon rain
showers the day before spring

The ‘Sam Merrill Highway’, or thoroughfare, busier than ever despite the wet weather, now that people are ‘sheltering at home’, was the perfect place to enjoy a late afternoon escape. The rain stopped on cue–not that it would have kept me at home–and the sky opened up over the LA basin, with shafts of light illuminating JPL and Long Beach like in an eighteenth century landscape painting with transcendental overtones. Then the clouds rolled in again, bathing the hillside in an aura of mystery and uncertainty, think London fog, more fitting to the trying times. 

Where'd you come from?
asked the hiker to the rock
how long you been here?
The rock pondered pensively
then said how much time you got?