Equinox passed. Clocks change at the weekend. Snowdrops have given way to daffodils, catkins to pussy willow, the camelias’ defiance of frost is inspiring the magnolia, and the hawthorn is leading the leaf-way. The inevitability of light and spring comforts and excites for it is beyond control hopeful. Let us, dear God of the green, let us not despoil it beyond rescue.
Mothering Sunday last week. Mother’s day now - commercially, though in church there were posies still, and new assertions of God’s motherhood.
Surprised into an abundance of family, invited by one son, arriving to find the other there as well, their wives and the two small boy grandchildren. Three mothers. A grandmother. I sat listening to the afternoon after lunch chat. Watching my two sons. My head finding it hard to conceive that I once conceived them, carried them in belly, in arms. Watching, listening, to two separate, different, independent men, fathers, husbands. Brothers. Lifetimes behind them, between them. Mine own and not mine own. They felt other, or perhaps I felt other.
Between them they cooked for us, washed up for us, brought us tea, and cake. It was ordinary special. Simple extraordinary. Easy celebration. Quiet glory.
That evening, home again, I wondered at how tired I felt, how bodily heavy. Not simply heavy, though, I found, as I sat wondering at it. Freighted. Though my mind had been unable – unwilling – to comprehend the mothering of these two men, my body it seemed had done so of itself, un-mind-ful, without taking heed. My long-past-fertile crone body was working its own remembering, weighingits own cargoes of bearing and caring; sensing the echoic reverberating of brothers in my two sons and his two sons, genetic, hermetic, perpetuating, combining, fuguing in a generational dance of generation. Ordinary, miraculous.