[first published 31.08.2025 Substack]
It may not be the calendar-allocated beginning of spring today but I’m celebrating a trifecta.
Coming in at first place: this morning it was warm enough (just) to not have to light the stove. That felt like a holiday on its own.
Second: I saw three blue wrens picking at insects outside the back door – one female in brown, one male in blue and black, one young lad in a mess of brown and blue. What a name they’ve got – superb fairy wren – and those gas-flame-blue boys earn it!
Third place: I passed a big brood (a dozen?) of freshly fluffed ducklings, with their watchful parents, climbing up out of the weed-burdened drain on the main road into town.
I could box this trifecta and add that my mother’s Japanese maple tree has started to get its red and lime-green leaf buds. It’s just over a year since she exhaled that last breath and it’s only today, looking at the maple’s pointy little buds, that I realised that every time I see something I want to show her (leaves, birds, clouds, beetle wings, sequins, rocks, moss, dogs, tree bark, vases, seashells, buttons… ), right up until my own last breath, it’s going to hurt.
I guess that’s how she felt too. Her mother died at 50. How did she cope? People say that this pain will diminish but I don’t think that’s right – it seems to become more pinpointed, more precise, more acutely linked to specifics. And I suppose that’s one way Mum coped with the loss of her own mother for those long sixty-plus years of the rest of her own life: by enjoying the wrens, laughing at the wood ducks trooping along the footpath, and being observant – in both the noticing and the devotional senses – of the small details of the lovely world.
New red cedar leaves:
