Month: April 2020

It was a great day for photos.  The peach tree continues to blossom, though some of the petals are starting to fall, either from the frost or from the natural progression from flowers to fruit. Time will tell.

And, as if to take advantage of the warm weather between freezes, the daffodils went from a single bud to a bouquet,

the plum tree burst out like fireworks

(it should be noted that never, and I mean never, have the birds left us a single plum),

the miniature irises went from little city-states to attempted-empire,

and the crab-apple in the front yard, one that we did not plant but that decided to grow there anyway, is dotted with tiny red buds.

We had another beautiful sunset,

that was graced with a couple hawks flying home for the night.

And then, of course, there was the moon:

It’s the largest Super Moon we’ll see this year and it’s called the Pink Moon and here, at least, it was for a while.

It was hard to catch the colour.

I am oh so grateful for these moments in the evening that provide some distraction and some easing of the sorrow and distress. But part of me wonders how the world can continue to reinvigorate itself so joyously when so many are suffering, dying, and having their lives up-ended temporarily or permanently by COVID-19. The dichotomy reminds of W.H. Auden’s poem, though the careless entities there are mostly human rather than Nature:

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

(Snagged from http://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/auden.html. Tgere’s a photo of the Breughel painting there.)

And our waiting continues.