Half Full or Half Empty?

Normally I’m a half full person – my glass is half full (unless I’ve been tippling, of course, in which case it’s actually empty but I still hope for another little drop).

And so it was over Easter.   Sun danced in the heavens.  No, I didn’t actually see it this year either, but I nearly did!  Two minutes earlier and I would have witnessed this sight that my father got us out of bed for every Easter morning.

Garden looked lovely, leaves sprouting as if they had just invented the idea of recreation.  Birds singing from 5am since the clock went forward – especially the lovely blackbird opening his yellow beak and dropping wonderful sounds into my head.  No 1 grandson moved garden stuff around creating ‘bird place’ with seeds and bath and shoving the sprawling rosemary bush, covered in its blue spring outfit,  back into some kind of shape.  I’d prune it if I had the heart and the energy.

Even the fact that a lingering cold still has me wheezing and coughing didn’t damper my ardour.  I reigned supreme in my domain and drank in the beauty.

And then today the sun vanished – or was it my brain that had gone grey?  Crows and pigeons raided the seeds, scaring off the Great Tits and the Blackbird, leaving only the brazen robin picking up the husks.  Sky was leaden and low.  Everything was too much trouble.  I’m sure I saw a black dog (just a little one) lurking in the foliage around the garden shed.

Now I’m going to get a big rock and throw it at that black dog ; and get a glass that will be entirely full, at least for a little while; and turn on my radio and hope that Seamus bloody Heaney will have stopped reading his poetry interminably as he was this morning. 

I mean I love poetry and stuff, but some days, y’know, you are just not in the mood for beauty!