It's the first day of Spring and I welcome the promise of change in the air. Our New Hampshire landscape is fresh, running with the water of melting snow and ice. I walked our road in an early morning chill with mist still covering the beaver pond and the patches of lingering snow at the end of the field.
What a long and complicated journey since my last blog entry in 2019. I am not the same woman I was back then. In fact, there are times when I don't recognize myself now -- older, grey-haired, solemn, curt. I have no patience with cruelty, deliberate ignorance and division simply out of spite.
This, after three years of man-made horrors and the constant attacks on freedom, compassion and respect for diversity across the world -- and then, the scars of Covid-19, a pandemic turned to political theater, panic and grief. And now, we face Russia's attack on Ukraine.
Change and transitions and loss. As I said, it's a long and complicated road we travel moving through light and dark and back to the light, shadows to our right, flames to our left.
Here's a poem I wrote in early 2020. My mother had just moved to a nursing-rehabilitation facility, her "new home". But Covid-19 was on the move, too. March 12, 2020, the center closed to in-person visits. My mother died a year later.
