It gets a little warmer. It gets light a little earlier. The birds are louder. I cannot remember wanting spring, needing spring, as much as I do this year. It’s not just me. Every time the conversation comes around to spring, people say this has been a long, tough winter. So cold. So much snow.

Life goes on pretty much the same, with the same concerns and worries — Mom, money, love, taxes — but I feel a shadow, an undertow.

I can’t stop watching the war on TV.

I get up in the morning and immediately turn it on, worried about what may have happened in the night. If I’m home, CNN is on — grumbling in the corner. Is it possible American troops will close in on Baghdad and Hussein’s regime will unleash one of those weapons of mass destruction they’re always talking about, and then the Americans will retaliate and so on and then we’ll all be in a bad place?

A numbness sets in. It takes a night of shock and awe to truly wake me up, or some surreal moment like when a fixed camera in Iraq records the sounds of Baghdad birds as dawn comes, or when meteorologists deliver weather reports for Iraq and Kuwait with the same sort of animated maps they use here. With the same gestures and upbeat attitude.

I feel another shadow: the global pneumonia outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

Thousands of people are quarantined in Toronto. On Thursday, a SARS clinic opened there. Visitors to hospitals are severely restricted. In one day, the SARS hotline in Toronto received 10,000 calls.

Officials want all people leaving Toronto via the airport to be screened. The World Health Organization is issuing bulletins.

Even Nova Scotia is preparing. Health Minister Jane Purves is looking at changes to the provincial Health Act, so the government will be able to order a quarantine or take other measures if the disease turns up in Nova Scotia.

I don’t think that I’m neurotic, but I have seen too many bad movies about unknown, airborne viruses running wild, with many ending up dead before the good guy triumphs. I think about where I would go if I wanted to flee. How close would I let SARS get before I made a run for it? Ten cases in New Brunswick? Five victims in Halifax?

My imagination runs wild. I’m thinking I would head towards Kejimkujik Park, in the centre of the province. Fewer people. Or would that be boxing myself in? The only way out would be over water to the densely populated eastern seaboard of the U.S.

Would it be better to make the trek through southern Quebec and Ontario — Canada’s own highly populated area — to make it into the northern prairies?

Is there any way I could get a car? My survival skills are minimal. I know how to make a toilet paper stove,* but I don’t even know my knots.

I brought this up in a group of people, casually, so they wouldn’t think me totally paranoid and nuts. Surprisingly, no one said I was crazy. Everyone gravely considered what they would do. Several opted for Cape Breton.

*A stove made from toilet paper generates a surprising amount of heat. Hold one hand up, fingers apart. Unroll five layers of toilet paper around it. Close your fingers and ease the circle of paper off your hand. Fold the top and bottom edges in to meet at the centre, making a paper doughnut. Place on surface and light. (I tried it on a cold burner of my stove.) You might have to make a few to brew a cup of tea, but you could do it. Yet another reason to keep a good supply of bum wad around. You never know.