tiny reddish toads, the color of the old brick path skip beside me as I water what once was pond now a shadowy bed of wood fern was this their ancestral home, a palace of green mossy water, cool in midday where generations of tadpoles, pollywogs became legged, lunged now pilgrims returned
I am always on the verge of rapture rising into Aprils blue skies at the sound of birdsong or scent of budding roses or his footsteps on the gravel path of the garden he creates for me each and every morning
a warning popped up on my weather app a bright red dot drawing my attention away from the burgeoning green rapidly overrunning winters dread all flotsam and jetsam left from cold and damp as Spring fills in gaps with bud and flower covering each edge of the garden with new tender morsels of Aprils unrestrained promise pink azaleas just beginning to bloom japanese maples with their frilly blossoms blueberry bushes holding clusters of future fruit camellias scarlet buds, ferns fiddleheaded, newly sprouted grasses tender as down then the red dot on the weather app Frost Warning, April fool, it may all be gone tomorrow
I've come home after wandering in deserts of all those possibilities I've come to a place that makes no sense on paper it is illogical probably reckless even foolish at my great age to move a thousand miles to a cottage and garden in which angels dance with irrepressible joy
I stand barefoot on warming ground knowing I no longer have dreams only this world bloody and undone as afterbirth a creation too imperfect in its perfection to allow for dreams of peace
resisting all nonsense of calendars and charts I navigate my small craft of hope and magnolia bloom toward all things green and growing I have set my course for Spring and life in all its wonder
For what little peace there is in the world I am grateful for courage and hope and love I am grateful for daffodils on the first of March I am grateful for little more than enough I am grateful for lost souls and steady friends and sweethearts and angels in disguise I am grateful
step away just for a moment lean back into the sun rest your head gently on the sky all the worlds open waiting for you to step away and run down the meadow path into the greening day
in the kitchen junk drawer with old pens and chip clips or mason jars on dusty cellar shelves used for summers fireflies or falls pear preserves or faded shoe boxes shoved under the bed where treasures of sea shells with bits of pale green sea glass are kept where will all this daylight be saved from one year to the next?
Epiphany-tide, ordinary time before our Lenten ashes and fasts how extraordinary this time of silvered days etched with gold scented with resinous incense of cedar and myrrh sweet grass braids draped across sturdy Saint Joseph release their green scent each time our door opens to the cold wind as the sound of angel wings drift in with the snow time enough for reflection in iced panes blue as the Madonna's shawl that blue of trumpeting morning glories and mourning that results in joy ahh the quixotic nature of faith in light of all that would make it unseemly and foolish yet, here we are in the ordinary time of Epiphany praying for the scales to be rubbed from our eyes and the touch of a garment to heal our stigmata wounds chalking C M B along the lintel and shoveling a path on the road to Gethsemane
thecourseofourseasons 