I’d smile back, but I Wear The Mask.

The View is clear: of all the effects of coronavirus, this is the nicest.

LOS ANGELES  — With so many people staying at home and off the roads, Los Angeles currently has the cleanest air in the world, according to IQ Air’s live quality city ranking. Following the issuing of the state-wide “Safe-At-Home” orders, many residents began working from home, lowering the number of commuters on the road. On March 18, L.A.’s infamous rush-hour traffic was moving 71 percent faster than it usually does on a Wednesday afternoon, The New York Times reported. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, last month L.A. experienced the longest consecutive “good” air days since at least 1980. Experts say the improvement is also due to fewer planes flying and less ground activity in general.”

— CBSLA News report from this morning.

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This is quite a switcherooney. Cast your mind back over the past few decades:

“Los Angeles in 1950 was well on its way to becoming the nation’s fourth largest city, or as some insisted, the world’s biggest parking lot. Its air was foul and its traffic congested, but the county’s air pollution watchdogs were confident that by summer they would reach “the turning point in the war on smog” and the state’s freeway builders were counting on their superhighways to move Angelenos around the Basin at a merry clp. By the time the decade ended, however, the air was more noxious than ever, the freeways were clogged, and Mayor Fletcher (“Freeway”) Bowron had been swept from office… The day most likely to be fixed in middle-aged memories of the decade, is October 1, 1957 (three days before Russian scientists launched Sputnik I), when the county’s 5,500,000 inhabitants were required, under penalty of a $500 fine and a six-month prison term, to abandon their incinerators in favor of trash cans, one of which had to be set aside for non-combustible rubbish. The switch paved the way for Mayor Yorty’s desegregation of tin cans and table scraps, and although it was not visible to the naked, smog-reddened eye, it also reduced dust-fall in the city’s air to about the 1940 level. Of even more significance, it bore out scientist A. J. Haagen-Smit’s discovery that the chief offender in polluting the air, was the automobile.”

— John D. Weaver, L.A. El Pueblo Grande, 1973

Our incinerator is one of the few left in Los Angeles — in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen another in anybody’s backyard setting. It recalls how far we’ve come, in air quality.

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The pollution-free air and general scrubbing LA has gotten from the rains have been a miracle for the plants in our garden. We are extremely lucky to have a space where we can relax the mask rule, getting to breathe as much as we want of the cleanest air on the planet. Imagine also, the welkin is scented this morning with perfume of lime blossom, essence of lemon blossom, and even the seductive allure of jasmine.