I think this is probably a post

I don't know if you've ever been to a Quaker meeting, but they usually last for an hour, and they are silent unless someone feels led to get up to speak. We don't have a minister and anyone is allowed to give spoken ministry. It can be a reading, an anecdote, a thought, a prayer, sometimes people sing. It can be anything at all except an argument with someone who has already spoken. 

Yesterday someone who has been coming to meeting for a couple of years got up to speak for the very first time. She said something interesting and helpful that built on earlier spoken ministry. I thanked her afterwards, over coffee, and she said she had been very nervous, and dithering as to whether to get up to speak, but she said she'd had no option: she just had to get up and speak. That's how you know when to get up - when you are driven by something insistent inside.

I was thinking this morning that writing a blog post, for me, is rather similar. I don't want to write one unless I have something bubbling away in my head that I want to share. That's why I haven't written for the last few days.

I could tell you what I've been doing in the interim - writing, knitting, sewing, cycling, moaning about my aching legs, trying to find cheap travel insurance for someone my age with my health problems, worrying about the 30,000 refugees on the Turkish border - but it wouldn't add up to a blog post.

What might be worth sharing is how I have been feeling since February arrived. Long time readers know to their cost how for years and years I have hated February. (Even the characters in my books hate February.)  

This year, despite the execrable weather, I feel differently. I keep thinking back to this time last year, when Mary was dying. This year the thought constantly running through my head like one of those banner headlines under a newscaster is: "No February could ever be as bad as last year's February." And the next thing I think is: "I am still here, still alive. Mary isn't. I am lucky. I get to see another spring, I get to talk to my kids and laugh with my grandkids, and hear that 3 year old Cecilia said on the day of the Superbowl "I would like to be a Broncos player when I grow up but I more want to do fossils," I get to talk and laugh with Mary's kids, I get to sit in the sun and play my sax and share things with my friends and cycle up the Monsal Trail, and laugh at the hilarious things Dave says, and so on and so on.

And I get to walk round the back of the shed and find a surprise - the têtes-à-têtes I hid round there last May after flowering - already blooming and ready to be carried round to the front doorstep.

So I am not going to moan about February again. And if I do, please remind me why I shouldn't.