The fields have turned into nurseries, full of wriggling leaping crying lambs and their mothers. Corvid nests await in skeletal trees. Beneath one nest, magpies--five for silver--bicker. On Thursday, a calf was born on the farm: blue-black, with a white, spiraled star on its snout. The deepest eyes stare at me. Every morning I wake up to birdsong, a robin perhaps, calling for a mate. In France, such birdsong gets rarer; as the Guardian reports, one-third, even two-thirds of some avian species no longer sing.

On Saturday, the worm moon occurred, signaling the time when earthworms begin to emerge from their long dark sleep in the soil. Saturday also marked a time of waiting in the Christian calendar. As an atheist, I can’t think of the Resurrection, only of my dead. The not-return. Can grief inspire? It definitely spurs reflection on the roads not taken. In the film The Way, an American man walks the road to Santiago de Compostela, where, according to Celtic legend, the souls of the dead gather on the shore outside of the city, to follow the sun across the sea. He bears the ashes of his son, who died mid-pilgrimage, a task undertaken as penitence. But the journey becomes the son's gift: enraged by grief, the father acts like an ugly American, only to yield to the kindness of his non-American companions. All day I meandered over certain occasions with Dad; memory as a kind of way-faring, away from the abysses of forgetting, toward the blessed plains of love. Recognising no nationality or border, the way appears only in mind and memory, landmarked by feeling.

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