Mid-Februaryand we've been enduring stormy weather. I have been picking up random pieces of plastic from the garden, without giving much thought as to where it had blown in from. My own gable end as it turns out. Oh!
Ok, not quite so undamaged as I'd thought. And then it turns out the timber is rotten, and most of the flying plastic, strewn with screws and nails had landed in my neighbour's garden, by way of a dint in their shiny BMW. Ouch!
The gentleman, of Turkish origin, hands back the debris over the fence and talks about the damage to his car. I come down off the ladder and take out my phone to assess what this is going to mean. But he is so sweet about it. No, he said. No. No. I am saying nothing. I am not asking. You have insurance. I have insurance. All it does is put up cost of insurance. We don't need that. The wind it blew, and my car was parked that side, but is only small damage. No worry about it. He gave me back the debris and that was that.
Except that his words stayed with me, his whole demeanour, his dignity. I remember my former neighbour from my old house,and how much of a drama there would have been if a single fence panel or a few stray branches fell. For some reason, I react with intense emotion to the simple kindness of grey-haired shopkeeper.
What are you upset about?, my friend asks, not understanding that emotion doesn't always equal upset. My heart is warmed, and it responds in tears. I am grateful for that small mercy in amongst my own little drama of wondering how much of the roof we need to replace.
At the first calming of the weather, I forget all that, give myself a day off and go for a wander. I had a route in mind, and then another, and at each turn I was pulled another way, because for all the winter storms I find that Spring has begun her stealthy arrival.
Looking out from my front porch I see that the blackthorn tree over the road is suddenly a mass of white flowers. How did I not notice their budding?
As I walk down towards the park, the river, the woods, I notice the verge along the Watton road is a green sky full of multi-coloured stars where the crocus bloom. I'm drawn to the eggy-ness of their colours. Golden cups tinged with white. Or pure white albumen holding yolky saffron threads. Spikey leaves pure brilliant green, or white-stranded.
I have a feeling that we see the flowers that speak most to our moods. On other days I'd have been drawn to the mauves and purples, but today…the thorn tree caught me first and told me look for white and yellow, silver and gold. On other days I would have made it to the river bank, but today I was called away by drifts of flowers near the Hall.
Snowdrops and Winter Aconite. Silver and Gold.
We had no snow this winter to dampen and rot the autumn leaves. They litter the ground still, dry and out of season. A crisp reminder of the unkiltering of the world. But Spring won't be stayed, and the flowers grow up anyway.
Snowdrops. Fair February Maids. Candlemas flowers. Delicate hooded beauties in their school-girl huddles, heads bowed, sharing secrets. Almost as if they feel the need to apologise for their audacity in arriving so early in the year, but finding their strength in numbers and drifting like the winter snow for which they're named – squint and you might not see them as flowers at all but as gentle flakes or carpets of hail waiting for the thaw.
Winter aconite. Harsh as its name. Low and bright and bold. If the snowdrops are the virginal nuns-in-waiting, not yet vowed to their god, then the aconites are the ruffed fair-haired choirboys attending them. And both parade in glory, reflecting the golden winter sun, and the silver of the moon. Sky shards fallen to earth, just like the crocus in their colours of distance stars.
I walked through the walled garden, still in its winter drab and through the dell where the fallen stones are mossy and inviting, and the trees remind us how quickly our man-made structures will fall away. It is a quiet peaceful space. A pink-suited runner was taking a rest. A moment of calm. And I felt guilty for intruding upon her meditation. She looked up, and smiled. I smiled, and walked on. Sometimes connections are made without words.
The exposed branches of the parkland trees are lichen-covered. A golden crust that resolves on closer inspection into leaf-like forms and goblets, of green and yellow and amber, and tinges of grey: an alien forest in miniature that makes me wonder what creatures (invisible to me) might live there. Are there such things for whom a single branch with such magnificent arboreal growth is their entire world?
It makes me think about our own perspective, and how much we might have right and how much wrong and how much we still have no conception of.
Down inthe woods, I'm pleased to find my triple-silver-birch still standing, but a sister tree behind her has fallen and I am drawn to go visit. Maybe to pay my respects or maybe just out of curiosity. She has been torn apart at the roots and collapsed under her own unanchored weight.
I am drawn to her bark-ripped trunk. I have seen these patterns before. They are the pathways of the creatures that live between the wood and the bark and feed on one or other or both. Holes speak of retreats into the heartwood of the tree but it is their sub-bark-networks that fascinate.
Is it a co-incidence that they create shapes that might resemble their own bodies? There is always the central cell, a shell, a carapace – and the many legs that spindle out from it. I am again reminded of the Nazca lines, but more closely I am wondering what this creature knows of itself. Then I find more intricate highways and intersections, which speak of a greater intensity of activity, a kind of urban chaos that makes the simpler constructions look even more like deliberate art.
I'm sure the biologists will tell me I'm anthropomorphising here – but they are the ones that think mankind is something outside of nature. I do not. If we make art, to educate, to explain, to beautify or just for the sheer joy of doing it, then to me it is no stretch that other creatures do likewise.
I reject the arrogance that mankind is some special creation. And I wonder about those bugs that live between the bark and the wood. I wonder what their imaginations conjure upof other worlds beyond the bark. And I wonder if they know that Spring is stealing in.
