Today is another quiet morning. It is chilly outside. -2 Celsius and the light sparkle of frost on some of the roofs as the sun slips out of her eastern bed spilling her springtime warmth.

I woke up early and I am writing as I do other things. Dribbling thoughts into my keyboard and up onto the white pages of my blog. Black letters on a white page.

Today is Holy Saturday, or Black Saturday. I don’t really follow the religion I learned as a child. Yet it is still there – the rituals and traditions of growing up. I remember this was always a day of being austere. Puritanical. A quiet day filled with an edge of expectation.

If something still needed to be done to prepare for Easter it was completed. But if it wasn’t needed it was not to be done. Black Saturday is really a day of mourning within the Christian tradition.  The meals on Black Saturday  were always simple, something boiled like pasta or roasted like potatoes, and  there was no flesh of any kind.  I think for my mother that made it a real holiday – as otherwise she was always in the kitchen baking and cooking.

Still, I do remember it was a day for visiting and visitors. Dropping by to see people that you knew you couldn’t see on Easter.  It was a day of going for walks in the nearby woods and seeing if early wildflowers and pussy willows had made an appearance. And then happily bring some home to mom.

Usually by Easter the weather had turned warm enough to melt most of the snow – so it was also a time for us children to go find large puddles and overflowing ponds. In rubber bo0ts and jackets we would explore the gullies for flowing water. There we would make rough boats out of scraps of whatever we could find. Setting them adrift and then watching sail away in the swollen ditches. Asking ‘do you think it will make it to the river?’ Or we would find rocks and try and sink each others boats.

If there was a pond near me now I would probably still go set some dream boats free – and imagine the long journey of that boat to the sea.

The birds are awake now. The sun is quickly warming up the air. Time to get going. Time to visit family and friends and enjoy the peace of the day.