This is the day!

[Rev. Elizabeth]

I lay still and listened. It was 4:30.  Two chickadees, their voices high and thin and wistful, called, teech--ur,  teech--ur.  Sometimes their voices carolled together; sometimes one voice was two or three measures behind the other.  On and on they went, singing, calling, filling the still, cool air with the plaintive sounds of their voices.  Morning was breaking.  Fog was lifting off the river, and sunlight was breaking through the clouds sitting atop the mountain and slanting through the windows. 

"What is so rare as a day in June?" the poet  ( James Russell Lowell) wrote.  Indeed, this day is promising to be a day of great beauty and delight.   A day we, who have weathered late frosts and torrential rains, have yearned for.

My good friend Ralph Ellsworth, who would bring me the fruits of the season: maple syrup in March,  strawberries in late June, apples in early October, used to tell me," life is uncertain,"-- and he said this with wisdom, rather than cynicism. That is not a sentiment I would have paid much heed to when I was 20, but now I think about it considerably, with neither despair nor resignation.  Life is uncertain, indeed.  But, each day is a gift, regardless of what we might encounter through its course.   As the psalmist wrote, This is the  day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it."