The best medicine of laughter

It’s funny how quickly we forget things. Every year, I am amazed by the sudden rush of spring birdsong — the sheer boastful carnality of it, from the robins that start before it’s really daylight to the smaller voices in the avian choir, the boreal and black-capped chickadees, the crossbills, and the wing-beat of a male grouse, out there doing his imitation of a tired engine starting. Even the whispered, almost desperate entreaties of junco nestlings calling for their parents — a strange little sibilant hiss of sound that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time — is a sudden hook back into a familiar past. It’s like the smell of sunwarmed wet black earth; the smell of a garden on a hot morning after overnight rain. You can “remember” it in a kind of academic way, remember, perhaps, the concept or idea of it, but that’s all completely blasted away in the very moment you actually smell it again. This year, as COVID-19 restrictions started to lift somewhat, I had a different kind of trip and fall into a familiar memory, this one not as a result of an experience found strictly and occasionally in the natural world. It was long-distance laughter. Long-distance, carried-onthe-warm-breeze laughter, from a yard where neighbours were framing in a garden by building a dry-stone wall. The kind of laughter that just bursts out, unthinking and unstoppable. There hasn’t seemed to be very much of that in the last few months. But there it was in all its deep-chesting rumbling surprise, a single burst followed by the whole chorus of the neighbouring choir, filtering across to me on delightfully warm air. Later in the evening, different neighbours. They were off to the left of me while I sat out in a deck chair as the light softened, and they were having a gettogether with a small group of people in their “bubble” (would we even have known about this term this time last year?) having a drink, a quiet and muffled talk, and, once again, the occasional louder ring of real, honest laughter. No one but me on our deck, but somehow, that low convivial murmur of conversation felt like it included me, felt like we will be once again what, at heart, we are: relentlessly social animals. Not all of us to the same degree, of course; personally, I can find full-on social events more than a bit overwhelming, but there’s nothing I like better, nothing that makes me feel more a part of something, than being on their edges, a small moon happily caught in their gravitational pull. I know, I’m a hopeless and sentimental sap. But I didn’t even realize how much laughter from afar was missing until it was suddenly back, and just how important it all actually is. Hopefully, we can all be careful enough of others, and thoughtful enough in our own behaviour, to allow things to continue to open up, without running into the hard shutdown of another COVID-19 spike. The conviviality of others lasted with me all through the day and evening, a sort of balm for the isolated soul. My feelings of goodwill to all lasted even after I went to bed, even after I realized a third group of nearby neighbours were sitting around their flickering fire pit and listening to a particularly loud and angstfilled folk version of “Whiskey in the Jar.” Well, my feelings of goodwill lasted almost that long.