My Dear Friend
I know that after three weeks of Friday regularity, my absence in your inbox yesterday morning, afternoon and evening must have have been disappointing (though I hope not dispiriting or demoralising). I do apologise, but I’m sure you’ll understand when I explain that I decided to use yesterdays’s non-work time to go to the market and find a piece of cake. With our city’s lockdown ended, but others growing longer or about to begin again, freedom to do such things feels fragile.
It was very, very quiet at the market. Nowhere near as many people as there would normally be on a Friday, and those of us who were there were wearing masks. I do think the masks make things quieter, don’t you?
It’s quiet, but there’s been a lightness of mood, partly the lifting of lockdown, but partly the change in weather too. Last weekend was the most weatheriest of weekends, with wind and rain and hail and plunging temperatures, and today I am sitting inside, looking at the rain bucketing down, but mid-week things were different. Mid-week there was a day when we didn’t turn the heater on, didn’t need an extra layer or a second pair of socks.
My Dad used to say that there’s always a day when you know that spring is coming. The temperature might fall again, and there might be more rain on the way, but there’s always a day when you step outside and feel that things have changed. And that day was this week.
I treasure that day when it comes. I rarely think of it during the rest of year, but then, on the day I feel that gentle warmth in the air, I always think, ‘Oh. Here it is,’ and it’s like having a little conversation with Dad. It’s like a little gift that falls halfway between the anniversaries of Dad’s death (July) and Mum’s (August). So many years have passed that their anniversaries don’t make me sad anymore, and with this day in between they are more just part of the gentle rhythm of time passing, winter ending, summer coming. Contemplative perhaps, but not sad.
Mind you, as you know, I don’t like spring at all. The dry north wind, the pollen, the itchy eyes, the scratchy throat. And these days, you can’t assume it’s hayfever, you have to second-guess: Is this COVID? And off to get a test.
Have you been watching the Olympics? I haven’t been not watching the Olympics, but I haven’t watched them either. I mean I haven’t been boycotting them or anything like that, but they haven’t captured me the way they seem to have captured everyone else. But that hasn’t stopped me arguing with everyone else in this house about what is or isn’t an Olympic sport.
I think perhaps I’ll say goodbye before I start boring you with my Olympics puritanism, eh?
I made you a playlist, it isn’t at all cohesive, just some of the songs I thought of while I was writing this to you.
Let’s talk again next week? And until then, every love to you, my friend
Tracy xx