The weather doesn’t help. San Francisco is renowned for its non-summers. And I suppose this is really the stuff of Mark Twain, unaltered in 150 years of writing and personal accounts. But it doesn’t feel that way.

It feels grim. The nation could by all reports get itself out of a downward virus spiral within a month of disciplined measures. Two months to really change course. This, everyone knows, isn’t going to happen anytime soon. But it’s the reason that dawns afresh each day, depressing afresh…to inaptly mix metaphors…anyone with a rational mind.

In an absence of national leadership everyone has to find his own way, reinforcing American individualism in a most unproductive manner. To illustrate. Jane pays a weekly visit to her daughter and grandsons in a Peninsula suburb. To ensure that everyone in this almost-immediate-family unit is adhering to strictures around corona virus transmission, her daughter is alert to news of her larger social network. She is ‘watching’ the grandparents of one particular toddler who occasionally comes to play. And why are these grandparents of concern? Well, it turns out they don’t exactly believe in the virus scare. Think it’s overblown. Don’t see the necessity for precautions, etc.

I can pull out what’s left of my hair over this sort of thing, but I don’t have enough hair. It’s way too common. But the effect is depressing. That’s why in desperation I look for a solar assist. Nothing like a sunny day to feel, well, sunnier.

And then there is the powdery mildew. Rest assured that tomato leaves do not acquire this white, sun-obscuring ailment without some bad meteorological behavior. I have a robust flowering of tomatoes under way in my greenhouse, the latter being necessary because of our maritime climate. And, yes, after too many foggy days, mildew does have a way of creeping in with the fog. But there are simply too many foggy days this summer. So the mildew has taken over like a 1950s extraterrestrial sort of, well, you know, pandemic.

Dispiriting. It’s enough to make a person grow Swiss chard. Swiss chocolate turns white much less often than my tomatoes, let me point out, but growing it requires an advanced horticultural skill that is ever so slightly beyond me. Never mind. The battle with the weather mirrors the battle with the spirit. The only problem being that with the latter, it’s hard to trust the forecast even remotely.