Of angel faces and boiled eggs for tea

I don't know if anyone - except perhaps for my bestie - will have a clue what that title is about, but it fits today's preoccupations. But before I get on to the end of the day, when it all came together, I have to announce that this morning it was sunny enough and dry enough for me to get all my towels - even the big thick bath towels - dried in the garden, for the first time in months. It even felt warm, briefly, as I tidied up pot plants just at my back door ...

However, we left it too late when we went out for a walk, and we were caught in a downpour that turned to a blizzard as we climbed up the Glen Massan road. By the time we came back down through the village (if you can call it that) the fields and trees were white, and there was a plume of blue wood smoke rising from a crackling fire beyond the cottages. Walking down this road always makes me think of my childhood holidays in Arran, when we'd walk up Douglas Row in Brodick, with the smell of smoke from evening fires in the houses and the promise of a boiled egg and maybe a floury muffin with strawberry jam for tea. I'd have sand between my toes and sticking to my salty legs, and all would be well with my world.

And the angel faces? It was, of course, Ash Wednesday. Far from going home for eggs and muffins, we were heading out to church for the liturgy which ended, as I said yesterday, with the hymn Lead, kindly light. The last verse talks about the angel faces "which I have loved long since and lost awhile". And the thought of that made me think of the growing number of people I have loved and lost, and it used to make me almost unable to sing that verse. I still think of the loved and lost, but nowadays I realise I'm lucky enough to have two new, younger generations of my own stepping into their places in life. 

Nostalgia is fine, but there's a future waiting to be discovered.