I thank Nora for her beautiful thoughts shared below... I know they are especially for her friend , but I’m sure she won’t mind if we broaden its embrace and offer comforting hugs to all in our parish who are ill.
May Altar … Nora O Connor
A few weeks ago I was heading to work on a beautiful may morning. I wasn't taking much notice of the beautiful day or my surroundings as my thoughts were mostly on Covid! Letter ready to show at the checkpoint.... Take your temperature when you arrive..... Anxiously wait like everyone else for results of the covid test taken a few days earlier!.... I was travelling via Kilcummin when all of a sudden two little baby rabbits darted out from the side of the ditch..... I had to stop to give them a chance..... and my eye was immediately drawn to a wonderful display of yellow primroses on a low ditch...... Patrick Kavanagh would probably have referred to them as "mostly anonymous performers".....
I was immediately transported back to childhood when we embarked on that joyful task of picking flowers for the May altar..... Usually the same varieties.... Cuckoo flowers, buttercups etc...... But if u were old enough or brave enough to venture further afield you would be rewarded with some bluebells or primroses!! Once a friend of mine and myself walked to Blackwater bridge(almost three miles each way!) because they had the best primroses growing on the ditch..... and they still have!..... The memories made me smile.....
Then I thought of one of my companions from those carefree times..... He is ill at the moment and on treatment....... Wouldn't it be great if we could have bottled some of that joy and delight from our childhood... I would open it up and sprinkle the contents in his direction and see him smile!..... But for now it's a heartful prayer, a virtual hug and a looking forward to happier brighter days which I know will come again.........
The sound of an oncoming car brought me back to the present.... .. By now the 'anonymous performers' were launching into an encore..... The rabbits had scurried off about the business of the day and so must I....... But this time I went with a smile on my face....the memories had renewed me.... I thanked God for the gift of memory, the gift of friendship, the beauty of nature and for all the "anonymous performers" in our lives and as I looked ahead at the mountains, majestic in the morning light... The blue sky.... The beauty of nature all around me......
I knew that we would be alrite because despite all the uncertainty and talk of covid and droplets and infection........ I knew on that quiet country road on a beautiful may morning that God was certainly in his Heaven or as Patrick Kavanagh so eloquently put it :"beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God was breathing his love by a cut away bog" .....
