An Easter We'll Remember

Whether you celebrate today as a religious person, a chocoholic, a bunny fetishist or a pagan, Happy Easter. Talk about convergence! I meant between the Christian liturgical calendar and the pagan seasonal passages-I still don't understand the relation of chocolate or rabbits to either side of that equation but that's the great thing about Livin' in the USA, tolerance.

Went for an early morning walk yesterday in and around my neighborhood, Washington and Lafayette Streets, near NFA in Norwich, Connecticut.  One of the things all the rain earlier in the week distracted us from, or at least me, was how much farther along the trees, bushes, and grasses are now than a week or so ago. Where there were lots of redbuds, and at a distance, you could also see light red glow on the tips of branches, there are now light green, tiny leaves pushing their way into the day.

And where there were brown and matted patches of grass at Chelsea Parade (the cut across from Lincoln Avenue to NFA; Sachem has a light and Williams has a crosswalk), there's green because the waves of NFA students shortcutting to school across the green have disappeared because NFA, like almost everywhere and everything else, is closed because of The Plague. 

For weeks it's felt like the Spring That Wasn't because this hasn't been the kindest time in our history and non-weather has overshadowed everything else. I'm not sure that means a whole lot to the baby birds hiding in the brambles on Grosvenor Place, and who grow very quiet when you walk by but begin squawking again the moment you pass. 

I'm pretty sure, based on prolonged observation, the grey squirrels have no opinion on the state of the world, as long as you fling a handful of peanuts their way once an hour or so. I was going to ask the young nurse in scrubs smoking a cigarette while sitting on the rock wall at the first (but closed) entrance to the Yantic Cemetery, which is around the corner from the W. W. Backus Hospital but the irony of her attempting to get a head start into the next life made me giggle too much to speak.

And we put on our best and bravest faces (even if under masks) while reassuring one another that we'll be alright though I'm not sure how any of us could know that because I certainly don't, but despite that, or perhaps because of it, life goes on even as the seasons shift and the heavens smile. Change is really the only constant in our existence and it's the desire to know what's around that next corner that keeps us running up that hill.

-bill kenny