a heavenly host

Every morning at 6:50 am, my friend Meagan calls me to wake me up. About half an hour later, I pick her and two other friends up at Rhoads and we all go to breakfast together. This is a treasured ritual and my day always goes better when I start it off nicely, but in January the mornings were especially rough. I would wake up to darkness, turn on my lamp to find my clothes, and wonder what I was doing awake in the blackness. The ground was covered in patches of snow and I would walk the path from Brecon to Rhoads gingerly, hoping not to slip on ice and gazing grumpily at the ice-encrusted duck pond. If you had told me then that before I knew it rain and sometimes even sunshine would replace the snow and that the ground would be covered in crocuses rather than muddy snow, I don’t think I would have believed you deep down.

This week, I was walking around campus when I saw what felt to me like a miracle. A few daffodils, which have been teasing me for weeks with their tender green shoots, were starting to blossom. This bright yellow, the color of a farm-fresh egg yolk, is absent during the winter and seeing it was a welcome change. It was an important reminder to me of something that I think is very relevant on Easter: sometimes it’s cold and dark and we forget that the color yellow even exists, and those times seem to stretch in front of us endlessly. But always, inevitably, the days get longer, we start to go outside with bare legs, and the daffodils show their faces again.