Lowell artist and teacher Richard Marion keeps a day-book or journal with observations about life in the city. Following is a recent excerpt describing a walk near the Concord and Merrimack rivers.

from “A Corona Day-Book”

by Richard Marion

April 16, 2020

. . . At the First Street memorial park I savored the variety of tulips which the Curb-to-Cobblestones gardeners have set in during the past years. I was pleased and surprised to find that the gardens at the side of the Boott Cotton Mills Storehouse were being mulched by Latino men working for a landscaping company. I asked if they would re-position a granite sign that had been pushed aside by a winter plow-man.  . . . At the Concord River Greenway, winds had felled the hyacinths and daffodils as well as grafted limbs on the flowering trees. The Purple Carrot bakery’s owner sat alone as I rounded John St to Merrimack St. . . . Five men conversed in front of the CVS while across the street there was not a person at Dunkin’s . . . Energetic road construction crews have been less challenged by the fewer vehicles on the roads and social distancing doesn’t seem to be concern of theirs . . . coffee-breakers support the Dutton St. Dunkin’s with a drastically different clientele at this excavating moment. Several streets away, the huge swaths of daffodils at the Gorham St. and Andover St. Enterprise Bank sites are an uplift vs. the invisible virus threat.  . . . As I type this the twilight is pale cerulean with striated shrimp-pink cloud bellies with lavender-gray midsections, hazing up, as blossom-budding maple trees have turned to ink-line traceries . . .