Sorry about the non-English post title—I realize it may need a bit of explaining. Italian is my other language, and since we’ve all heard the word “quarantine” a zillion times lately, this title just popped into my head. “Quarantine” comes from the Italian word quarantena, which means a period of forty days. It comes from the fourteenth century, when the city of Venice weathered the Black Death by making merchants wait outside the city for forty days before they could enter, to make sure they weren’t infected with the plague. Well, since our modern collective quarantine efforts are preventing me from visiting Mt. St. Helens for its quarantesima (fortieth) anniversary today, this seemed fitting—if a bit too on-the-nose.

So instead I’ll post a sketch I did around the thirty-fifth anniversary of the eruption (the same day I did the final sketch in this post). I remember marveling at the time that a scene so peaceful could belie such destruction in the recent past (and, certainly, the future to come)—and that seems just a little too on-the-nose right now, too. So instead I’ll just focus my thoughts on the pretty mountain, the pretty lake, the pretty wild irises, and the memory of a pretty perfect morning.