visiting the grave on Laetare Sunday

which is also daylight savings time

It’s very sunny and the trees are blooming. The forecast says that the weather will not dip below freezing overnight again. So it seems like the tree buds are here to stay. It seems like it’s been spring for two months now, here, but today it is spring in earnest.

A large grasshopper lept out of the dead leaves by the driveway. The winter birds are gone. The trumpet vine is blooming. I’ve never been here in the spring, so I’ve never seen the snow drops before.

Worried about the fig tree, I watered it today in the sun. A couple of daffodils are wilting already in the heat.

But I checked the forecast again and El Niño is continuing to deliver warm, wet weather this spring.

Where is Da Jane? I wish she were here. How silly and strange to keep moving without someone. But she told me to write my book—to write my book, get it done. And so that is what I will do.

The daylight is saved, and it continues, even as the wind and chill make a winter coat necessary as I pop by the Presbyterian Church after Mass.

“For who in the World will both mourn and rejoice at once and for the same reason? For either joy will be overborne by mourning or mourning will be cast out by joy; so it is only in these our Christian mysteries that we can rejoice and mourn at once for the same reason.’

The Church Mourns and rejoices at once, in a fashion that the world cannot understand”

So says Thomas of Canterbury in his Christmas address.

Rainy is sleeping on Da Jane’s scarf—the shawl I brought her from Jerusalem. She looks up occassionally, alarmed, as the wind rocks the trees boldly back and forth—they move a lot for something so tall. We heard a branch fall earlier today.

How much has changed, I contemplate, sadly, since James and I selected those scarves in Jerusalem. How much has changed.

So much seems to have died this winter. But perhaps all is not lost. And new life will bloom again this spring. Perhaps what is the most necessary remains and what is unwanted has been pruned. But perhaps that’s not all that there is.

Resurrection means something. It doesn’t discount death but overwhelms it. And so we praise God in the midst of Lent. There is gratitude, even in agony.

Death is not an aberration, but woven into the fabric of all our living. It’s right there in the psalms, in the seasons that take and give. There’s a violet blooming in the dead grass.

But so, too, is Resurrection. What it means fully, we don’t quite know yet. But we rejoice and mourn, for the same exact reason.