While not officially Spring yet, today, Spring is here.

Early daffodils are adding a splash of colour to the green of pastures. The grass is growing, but surprisingly wanting some rain. Who would have thought we would ever say that at the end of a Taihape winter?

There are a few lambs out and about—their soft bleats sounding from the hills. Wattles and wild plums are in bloom, while there is definite bud movement in their domesticated cousins.

Is it my imagination, or does this all seem a little early? Note to self, need to be more systematic at record keeping. So often I have heard someone say that last year, or last decade or when they were young, winters were clearer and colder, or wetter and warmer, or Spring was earlier or later, or the cabbage trees are definitely flowering at a different time than usual this year. All these utterances made without any proof.

Human memory is an unreliable mechanism at best.

However, there is no doubt that after the cold and dark of winter, a warm day with bright sunshine and the feel of new life in the air gives your spirit a lift. It provides a spring to your stride but also brings a restlessness.

I feel it now.

Time to be out and about. Time to be doing – stuff!

Suddenly it seems that time has either run out or is running out to get all those winter jobs done. But it is not only the winter jobs. Added to those projects are sowing seeds and other tasks associated with getting the vegetable garden into production. There are the grounds at the Lodge. They will need a good tidy up before we get busy again with guests. Janey and her team have been repainting many guest rooms, but that will all need to be finished soon.

But this season, will we get busy with guests?

With Auckland, due to COVID being in lockdown level 3 and the rest of the country at level 2, what will the season ahead bring? One thing is for sure. It will be unlike anything we have experienced before.

It is sobering, and not altogether helpful, to dwell for too long on the realities of the current economic environment. For myself, a business owner, like many others in the same position all around the world, this situation brings a heavyweight of responsibility. People, be they family, staff, suppliers or customers, are relying on you. And yet so much is outside your influence, let alone control.

All you can do is get up each day and try as best you can and make the best decisions you can.

Anyway, enough of this line of thought.

Come April, and it will be mid-autumn. The business decisions we have made now will have worked out for the best, or not.

But the grass will still be green, the sky blue. The river, caring little for the wants of man, will keep flowing, murmuring and chuckling its own story on its journey to the sea.

The earth will still be here, and hopefully, at some stage in this COVID world, we take the time to stop, feel and listen to what it has to say.

Brian Megaw