Columns

This Week in H’burg is a weekly column featuring photos and fun facts from local photographer Pierre Ratté. Each week we’ll feature a new photo from Ratté along with a fact about the subject matter of the photo.

“I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

The recent extreme cold weather has had one lovely result for me: I have reprised my role as the Joke Lady at Mattie Washburn School! Well, okay, for two classes …

I never thanked my mother for teaching me to read.

In a few weeks all of us will mark a full year of living in this COVID-19 time of a pandemic, sheltering in place and worrying about what terrible things like more wildfires, a positive virus test or loss of a job might happen next. What has this year of disease, tension, uncertainty and new daily living patterns done to us? Are we all becoming Zoombies?

This year of 2020 that is now coming to an end started when three people in Wuhan, China were found to have contracted a “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus” which became known as COVID-19 and has now infected 73 million people worldwide and has killed 300,000 U.S. citizens and 1.62 million global inhabitants with the threat of killing millions more into the new year. The rapid spread of the virus closed whole countries, stopped international air traffic, halted global commerce and changed our domestic political debate.

Jenny Levine-Smith