Only last week I sat in a friend’s garden, reading Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell in the brilliant sunshine, drifting between the 16th century and this one while three dogs roughhoused in the damp dirt spiky with spring's strident shoots. At the gate, the neighbour's children giggled, peeking at the dogs, their heart's desire in that moment. The next day, a fifty-euro note drifted down main street like tumbleweed, and snow fell, glinting in the sunlight before evaporating into a quare memory.

Between the demands for my attention from husband, mother-in-law, clients, and pub patrons, there were coffee dates and dog walks and yoga, even a bluegrass concert in the arts centre down the street. I walked the woods: dappled with golden saxifrage or starry with wood anemones, speckled here and there with cowslip and dandelions.

One night a band played in the pub, which was busy for once. Even the Maloneys came in, for the first time in six months. Kate was accompanied by two young Ukrainian women, refugees sheltering in emergency accommodation, a holiday apartment complex. The next day the news broke on atrocities committed by the Russian army in a suburb of Kviv, a small town just like this one, where the bodies of the two women’s fellow citizens lay in the streets for weeks. Terrible things are happening in other places, and of course I thought of how fortunate I am.

<<