My birthday weekend Part Two: Love and Death - April 2015

I am grateful to Mr. Julian Calendar for arranging the Easter Weekend to fall around my 40th birthday, as it meant that I could squeeze in a lake walk on the Bank Holiday Monday, and still use the excuse of it being my birthday.  I am thinking I might just continue on celebrating throughout April, and possibly even the rest of the year... perhaps even until I turn 41 and someone tells me I really actually have to stop celebrating turning 40 now.

We'd had friends over for coffee in the morning, and fog was starting to descend on the Fylde Coast. John and I decided to chase the blue skies promised on the Weather app on my phone.  Grasmere is only an hour or so away, and so we jumped in the car and looked nervously at the skies until we left the motorway, at which point the sun came bursting through - hooray!

What with it being the Easter Bank Holiday, and with me being a Christian, I’d perhaps done more reflecting than most about love and new life, through from Good Friday to Easter Sunday.  But there was yet more to remind me, when only about 10 minutes into our walk, we were confronted with a huge pond of froggy lovin’. 

Mr Lovva Lovva

A close up of the frogs.  If it looks like a leaf, it may well be a frog. If it looks like a frog, it is a frog, or possibly two frogs, if you know whadda mean ;-)

Looking at the map, I think it was actually Whitemoss Tarn… so I'm doing it a disservice calling it a pond.  And I'm now pleased I can add another 'lake' to my list! There was some serious partying going on… the water was thick with frogs croaking to one another.  I’d never heard a frog croak in real life before, but I certainly had by the time we left the pond-side.  There was a dull roar in the air, a bit like a faraway hoover.  I’m hoping you can hear it on the video below (before the zooming out mechanism makes more noise than everything else!). 

We could have stood there in the afternoon sun, spotting frogs for ages, but decided that would have made us a bit weird, and poor Usko would have felt tormented at not being able to chase the jumping little amphibians; so off to do our anti-clockwise circuit around Grasmere we went.

It seemed that every step of the walk, we saw animals in pairs: geese, herons (who had a nest high up in a really tall tree.  I don’t know why this surprised me: herons are birds that fly, why wouldn’t they nest in trees?!), butterflies, and no, not sheep, but the lambs were gambolling around. Everywhere were pointers to the new life that Easter is (to me, certainly) all about.

We sat at Howe Top, which was only a few minutes in, but it’s such a lovely view from the bench, that we decided it was time for our first cuppa.  And I tried out the zoom on my fancy-pants camera.

The bench

The view

The zoomed view

Apparently you can click on these pictures to see them bigger. I didn't know this until last week. Anyway, the zoom is rather good, and I feel like I could star in 'CSI' now, and legitimately say "Can you look closely at the corner of the photo and see what book he is reading?" and it could maybe nearly actually be doable ;-)

We then descended to the village of Grasmere, and Wordsworth’s house.  The mountainous backdrop as we approached the village was just gorgeous. If I were a proper aficionado, I would name the mountains for you. But I ain't. So I won't. You can look them up if you're that interested ;-)

The church in the village plays a tune on the hour, and it was 4 o’clock as we got there.  I found myself humming along, recognising it as an old hymn (which is called St. Clement according to my mother-in-law), and then realised the first line of the hymn is “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended”… not quite the jollity of the new life I’d been thinking of a few minutes earlier.  

It turned out to be a sign of things to come on the walk: as many frogs as we’d seen in the party pond, we must have seen a quarter again as ex-frogs.  Squashed on the road mostly.  Perhaps on their way to the tawdry tarn of froggy fornication, but they didn’t make it there.  It was really quite grim.  But the saddest sight of all was actually on the lake’s edge, when I was so keen to get to a clump of daffodils to take a picture ( -well, we had been past Wordsworth’s house after all, it would have been disrespectful not to), that I almost tripped over a dead Canada goose :-(

Needless to say, I didn’t photograph any of the carnage I’ve mentioned; I found some other daffs to snap later. 

Beautiful gardens on our way down to the village

Dog on a rock photo 1: trying to get the dog to pay attention

When he realised I was holding a treat, he was more interested

The garden at Wordsworth's cottage

A (living) frog

Sneaky peek of a stream in someone's back garden

Grasmere

Snack time. And no, I couldn't be bothered to airbrush the lead out of this one

John took this. He was describing it to boy3 as 'a beautiful lady drinking some tea'. Boy3 looks up and laughs "No Daddy! That's just Mummy!". Oozes charm, that child.

Dog on a rock part 2

Green stuff on a rock.  Fascinating, but annoying, in that whenever I see one, I get Frozen's 'Fixer Upper' song stuck in my head, and I don't know it very well, so I only have a couple of lines going round and round on repeat :-/

*Sighs*

And so I ended a wonderful weekend cogitating the circle of life.  Missing my parents, but grateful for their continued life in this world, through me, my sister and our children; and grateful for their new life in the next world, where they are without pain, cancer, or sadness.  I am grateful for the hope that my faith gives me: that through the sacrificial death of a God who loves me, and the amazing resurrection that defeated death itself, I can look forward to that same joyful afterlife.

Apologies to those of you for whom that doesn't resonate; but that is what was on my mind this Easter.  Death, love, and new life.  
Peace to you xx