If we are blessed with only so many springs, it is important to celebrate them, writes Jenny Beck.
Yesterday, a chilly sun broke through the clouds.
''It's trying hard to be spring,'' I called out to Clair across the passage.
''Which puts me in mind of Judy,'' she said.
''A couple of years ago Judy said to Katie, 'I've got only 15 pussy willows left'.''
I knew what she meant. Judy must have been 55 and if hers was the allotted span of years on Earth she would see only 15 more springs.
It sobers you, when you're close behind. It also enlivens you.
''We must enjoy!'' said Clair and I to each other, almost simultaneously, in the midst of a working Thursday. Especially now that, shockingly, we find we're in the second half of life and the paucity of time left - it's becoming an unsettling conversational theme.
Today is Friday, and I went out to see it. I had two judicial conferences in the Family Court in Gore, and blow it! I thought, sometimes you have to leave the office to its own devices; you have to walk out and meet the spring morning.
Especially if you have the company of your last-born, sneakily taken out of school for the day. He sat beside me testing shades that he'd found in the glove box. Perhaps they were to lend camouflage while driving out of town, just in case we knocked slap! into the principal.
Yesterday's cold sun had become warmer. The daffodils on the motorway near the Mosgiel turnoff (I call it Les Cleveland Hill) were responding, open wide and swaying.
''Look, Zak!'' I said, thrilling to the sudden sight. ''A carpet. Or is it a sea? Or perhaps a floral vision, this unfolding colour?'' (He's used to the odd appreciative outburst.)
I saw them again at the turnoff to the airport, and then there they were in Big River Town, daffodils standing up in chorus on the far bank of the mighty Clutha, spelling out the name Balclutha.
And against the library in Gore, blossoms fat and pink. Branches so impossibly arrayed that I thought, ''Today's the day between yesterday and tomorrow, we've obviously caught the hour of full splendour before millions of tiny petals are borne away by puff and gusts of wind and spring's wasted''.
Everywhere. Everywhere the scents of spring, sweet, fresh and warm. You can't help but think of E.
E. Cummings in such circumstances: ''I thank you God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky ...''
Spurred on by a ''Faith At Home'' seminar the previous weekend, I'd intended to engage in a little encouraging faith talk with Zak in the car. I got no further than a breathy ''Wow! Look at that!'' as we passed Lake Waihola and the willow hanging down to meet the sheet of almost black water.
And, ''So wonderful!'' while pointing to two hefty lambs leaping at their mother and pulling, their skinny tails wiggling in ecstasy. We saw newborn lambkins too, too young to leap and wiggle, tottering and looking out at the world with eyes just beginning.
Faith talk? It was all before us. This was truly ''the sun's birthday ... the birthday of life and love and wings.''
One can't help looking, as Elizabeth Fry did, ''through nature up to nature's God''.
Geoffrey Chaucer described nature as ''the Vicaire of the almighty Lorde''. The vicar representing pope or bishop is also defined as one appointed to do the work of another. Nature working on our hearts and whispering the name God.
I thought of Blaise Pascal - I don't carry philosophy in my head, but as a student I had this quote pinned to the board above my desk for a couple of terms - who said that nature in her perfection is God's image.
And what an image, as we sailed through Southland. I trusted that Zak was participating in a faith conversation without words.
I didn't see any pussy willow today, having eyes only for blasts of brilliant colour, signs of profligate spring. But let me not forget its furry stem to slick fingers down, its little nubby buds to squeeze.
Branches in a clear glass vase against the mirror, grey repeating pink and grey. Clair brings them in from her garden and they're a pleasure at the corner of my eye during an interview in the office boardroom.
Today was a spring day for seeing. I may feel surprised, alarmed even, that I'm that much nearer heaven (15 more springs myself), but I intend with a confident heart to love each new pussy willow.
Jenny Beck is a Dunedin lawyer.
Tell us about your best day. Write to odt.features@odt.co.nz. We ask correspondents not to nominate weddings or births; of course they were the best days.
