The weekend after Easter—Easter Saturday and the Second Sunday of Easter—didn’t seem like a weekend at all. Time is like that these days. Even having virtual Mass on a Sunday and keeping to the school week doesn’t erase the sense of being in some kind of liminal time. It is almost like the strange stretch of the summer holidays when we are home and our friends are away, still on holiday somewhere. Almost. But not quite, because when you do see people out and about, you have to stand six feet away from them to have a chat, and the topics of conversation are far from the usual.
Forget-me-nots 
Somehow there were still chocolate eggs on Easter morning 
The weather has been amazing 
A flower I couldn’t identify 
One of Anna’s sunflowers has sprouted 
Exploring a new bit of local woods 
Newly-leafed oaks 
Tulips from a friend 
Lockdown cheesecake: file under ‘desserts without flour
The signs of spring continue unabated. The farm smells as farm-like as ever, pungent, with mixed aromas of cow and sheep and heaps of dung for fertilizer—or so I imagine. What else could those smelly heaps be for? Some of the sheep have been shorn, and in the field along the path lambs skip (really) as the adults graze, untouched by the energy of the new generation. Their skipping time has gone.
Sometimes I feel like that: my skipping time has gone. These have not been easy days for me, though I can’t blame the dreaded virus. It’s just me, as I have always been, with ups and downs. Lately the downs have dipped into deep darkness and despair. It has occurred to me that this may be normal for me, but it is not normal. So maybe my normal can change. This is a radical thought, mind you.
But not, I think, an impossibility. And that is somewhere to start.
Deo gratias.
a theologian in the family 