Easter surely is the most wonderful time of year

It’s more than a little troubling when one can remember the Andy Williams Show in glorious black and white television.

Coming up to every Christmas, one of his big hits was: “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”, a great little melody, but looking out this week on a stunning April sunrise after a full moon and a clear sky, maybe there’s a case for disputing the theme of the song.

If the weather is reasonably benign, as it has been for the last week or so, there is something truly refreshing about Easter, with sunlight greedily eating into the early and late edges of night time and the entire countryside taking on a lush green look.

Mind you, it was all an awful lot different last year when we had endured a very dry but extremely harsh March leaving fields with a grey and barren hue. It was the time of year when most farmers saw their silage stocks run out with not a decent blade of green grass to be seen, and that brought its own pressures.

This year, ‘The Ould Cow Days’ of early April weren’t too bad at all to us and as the grass begins to go forth and multiply, the bovines are gradually showing less and less interest in the round feeder with its grass harvest from 2013. The change in the year has come and most welcome it is too.

In March 2012, the temperatures touched the 20° Celsius mark while in 2013, the wicked wind from the east left us with a hungry spring, but this year it’s back to a more normal cycle with slightly above average temperatures and now there’s a crust appearing on the muck that laced our gateways through the winter.

If we have a problem this time of year, it’s that the wheel of time is whirring by, far too quickly, and as spring seamlessly slips into summer, there will soon be talk of early silage cuts, Connacht finals and even the Galway Races. But if we could lose ourselves in our daydreams and stall the clock, then Easter would surely be the time of year, to hold what we have.

Back in childhood days of the 1960s, there was always a great tradition of sowing the corn in the run-up to Easter and especially on Good Friday, if the weather conditions permitted.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.