Frontispiece

It’s a long and wonderful story how this came to be, but here we are, standing in for living beings, humanity, motherhood, infancy, and the benefits of hosting the right virus at the opportune time.

We are the book’s frontispiece, no less, and that’s a word I learned in the process of giving the author, eminent microbiologist and expert on viral ecology Christon J. Hurst, permission to use the image after he found it—and then me—on the Internet early last year.

That the printed book arrived in the mail straight from the publisher precisely on the day Poland celebrates Children’s Day seems just perfect.