I find that if you look through the pieces when you break something there is always a beautiful fragment sent by the universe to keep us sane. The pandemic is no different. One of my favourite websites, Three Beautiful Things is back after a long pause like a ray of sunshine through dark clouds.
Here are mine for today.
The sky is falling. In these cloudless haze-free lockdown days, little blue butterflies slide past, like paint-chips of broken sky, swirling this way and that. Orange tips are like fragments of cloud, their edges still burning. Commas are smouldering embers. Peacocks and tortoiseshells suggest tiny cog-wheels and mechanisms falling from the sphere of heaven and yellow brimstones float like broken peices of sun.
The sky is falling.
butterflies, lockdown | in Fenlands, pandemic My trips to New York echoed my run on Babylon where different facets of my life converged in London for a while and then moved on. My first visit was less than six months ago. Four visits later and I wonder if I will ever return. It certainly seems that my prediction of an early return to Brooklyn were premature as that benighted city groans under the weight of Mother Nature aroused. I have acquired a lot of free time in these strange days and the Night Planted Orchard has never looked finer as a consequence. Working at home has saved me ninety minutes of spring daylight, every day. I have never been more productive at work. Outside of work I've upcycled a bedside cabinet, restored an old turned bowl, written a half-decent short story. I broke Lady Snoutingdingles favourite glass and mosaiced the stub into a viking style drinking vessel. I've even weeded the orchard, which is now in a state of shock. As are we all. The bees squatting in the owl box in The Old Laughing Lady are bemused at my constant presence. Even the Old Hunter is delighted to have us both at home all day, every day. Yet he is strangely discomfited by our distance. He knows that something is amiss from the World.
Precious pots break. The pieces become crocks in the bottom of a plant pot. After a span of time they fall into the compost heap and from there into the ground. The cycles of the Earth sleep them deep and then return them for a moment to the sun. Such moments bring memories, some no more than a hook to an earlier time, some are joyful, some bittersweet. Listening to an old song in the car, a shard of the same kind came to mind. This most precious of all vessels was lost a quarter of a century ago. My grief was a smashed and shattered thing not handled neatly and entire. Not easily swept up and tidied away. It exploded like thrown china. The shrapnel buried deep. The peices emerged without warning over years, like fish-bones, or the limescale in a cup of coffee, or a small stone among the oat-flakes. Their edges preserved like scalpels by soft and cunning wrappings in their hiding places. Their colours fresh, crimson and vermillion and whatever the colours of broken hearts or early-fallen fathers is.
On reaching my destination I had to sit and listen to the radio until my good order was restored. It wouldn't do to go into Costa in a state, now would in.
