Today March ends, and tomorrow April begins. An insignificant transition from one month to another, except that it’s not. Existential cogs and wheels whir, seasons pass a well worn baton, nature inhales deeply and stretches toward sunlight, and Lake Champlain stills to mirror the morning. Reflection rhyming; rhyme reflecting.
It was 6:59 AM on March 32, 2020 and I was standing on the front lawn. Alone. Griffin had passed away a few months prior, and Carley had not yet joined our family. The pandemic was raging, and we were living through quarantine and confusion.
Something about this view, the world reflecting itself upside down, stunningly beautiful but stark and austere, stalled seasonality’s relentless parade. For a while. That’s how I remember these weeks, these months, turned inward, isolated, worried.
Little by little we would all begin to reach out of our isolation like crocus and snowdrops and hyacinth and daffodils awakening after hibernation, stretching out of the dark earth toward the light. Email, text messages, phone calls, and Zoom. Virtual gatherings and joy in reconnecting, in navigating this terrible test together, meaning made and found in helping one another, encouraging one another.
Those days turned into weeks turned into months of reflection. A time of transformation. Soon a new Labrador Retriever, Carley, would join us. Soon we would plant our best vegetable garden in recent memory. Soon I would drive to Chicago under peculiar, challenging conditions to transport my parents from their “Windy City” home to their “City Different” home. Soon Susan and I would resuscitate plans for the icehouse rehabilitation that we’d all but abandoned more than a decade before.
Five years later, meditating on our mirror-perfect lake, on all that is seen and unseen, all that’s changed and all that’s stayed the same, I am moved in mysterious ways. Grateful. Beyond grateful for so much. So many. Grateful, but also melancholy. For so much. For so many.
Reflecting on reflection. A feedback loop. For a moment. Until the breeze freshens and the lake ripples…
What do you think?