Everything At Once

When we went to bed last night, the lake ice in front (back?) of the house was still there--increasingly rotten on the surface, but intact. 

This morning, it's not. Ice breakup is a huge sign that the earth really is invested in this new season. Spring is willing to crack the ice for us. Or perhaps for herself, with us as grateful beneficiaries.

A while later, it started to snow. 

Everything is happening at once. The fight against the pandemic is not going well in Canada and especially in Ontario. 

Yet age eligibility for vaccinations is dropping all the time, and we have made what appointments we can. 

I've long proclaimed a fondness for nuance, for "both/and," for "life is complicated." For one thing, life IS complicated, and in nuance lies the richness. 

And it's also true, because both/and, that (as I have said before here, recently): spring is exhausting. 

Much as I'd like to finish out this pandemic (at all) with the illusion that I'm self-sufficient and "I'm fine, we're fine, it's all fine" (which I am, we are, it really is), the tension is wearing on me. Even on me, by which I DON'T mean that I'm some superhuman pandemic-weatherer so much as I mean that our "pandemic time" has been relatively easy, and my heart goes out to those whose time has been so very different. 

That's it. Some things change; some never do. (Politicians will forever throw blame around like candy while ducking responsibility.) But March is over. Daylight is returning, and the ice is leaving. I'm grateful for those things.