THE view is changing. While normality as we know it has ceased, nature has not hit pause. The first morning as I sat down at this desk in my spare room around mid-March, the garden outside was in the final throes of winter's grasp. Its palette a dreary, greyish brown, all bare branches and fallow earth.

Yet, each day, there is something new to see through the window. The trees are budding, wildflowers springing up, and birds – long-tailed tits, bullfinches and sparrows – flit back and forth from the feeders, gaining sustenance as they embark upon the well-practised dance of the breeding season.

At dusk one evening, an eight-strong herd of deer gathered just beyond the garden wall. Usually timid and skittish, on this occasion – emboldened by safety in numbers – they seemed unperturbed by our eyes upon them as they grazed.

There is a splash of yellow from a shrub with bright, bell-shaped flowers growing wild along the boundary. I'm not sure how it got there. Perhaps a previous owner planted it. Maybe it seeded in a fortuitous gust of wind. Either way, I'm grateful for its canary hues as I peek over my laptop.

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Although not everything is idyllic. A dead mouse lay stiff on the path the other morning, likely poisoned by a trap in a nearby garden. I saw it in the blue light before sunrise when my collie Moose thundered outside to void his bladder and paused briefly for a curious sniff.

That same day, a nesting box fell from its lofty perch with a clatter during blustery weather, despite having survived countless winter storms. Thankfully it was not in use.

Now we don't have places to rush, time has never felt more elastic. I'm seeing things properly, not simply bustling past with half an eye to my surroundings.

Holidays are cancelled. Celebrations postponed – or conducted online within the abstract virtual realms we inhabit. One where everybody is in a box (the screen) within a box (computers and smartphones) inside another box (our homes) like neatly stacked Russian dolls.

Outside, the heads of freshly potted primroses are gently swaying in the breeze, plants my mum gave me months ago that I only got around to freeing from their root-bound state last weekend. The big larch, which always looks so forlorn during winter, is awash with green buds.

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It is comforting to see these changes. As the weeks and months pass, the garden's splendour will build like the swell of an orchestra to its heart-soaring crescendo.

Joyous? Of course. But, most of all, it serves as a much-needed reminder that we won't be stuck in this limbo forever and that, hopefully, our best days are yet to come.

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