Spring finally arrived, and when it did so, it came hesitantly, dithering and swithering between its noun form and its verb form, peeping out here and there from shadowy corners and straggly verges.
Slowly at first, it seemed to gather pace, new buds popping out suddenly from everywhere, gathering momentum like a green flame that licked across the garden, finding a landscape willing to give itself absolutely to the flicker. Across the planted borders it seemed to spread, brown meeting green, finding the hydrangea, last year’s flower heads still dandling like antique lace or cuttings from a story of summer long since passed. That’s a love affair now to be forgotten, and so these sepia memories will soon be consumed by the green spring fire that will clear the way for a new summer to come.
Beyond the borders of our garden walls the blaze spreads. The near hills, aloof and expectant stand like debutantes ready to try on their new garb, the bankside vegetation that follows the river up into the heart of the valley is already thickening, and I know that in a few short months, many of those bone-bare trails I have walked over the winter months will be overgrown and tangled, returned to their states of storybook jungles or treasured islands of the books I read as a boy; their green depths could be anywhere.
For this is the true nature of spring. Winter is a season for the literal, for facing up to the cold, stark bareness of reality, something for which our forebears were always well-prepared; such large doses of reality could easily swallow us all, and so required the storing up, the setting aside and the surplus in store. Spring, however, is the season of the figurative, a time when branch and twig become laden with so much more than leaf and bud.
A hyperbolic rawness takes over the senses entirely, and metaphor abounds wherever the eye may fall, each new growth and each departure of the old becomes an easy and yet potentially poignant indicator of new life, relationships, losses and any other number of countless meaning with which the casual wanderer might wish to bestow the landscape that unrolls with each step they take.
Even that which is familiar becomes a living simile, given back to us in a not-quite-the-same, deja-vu haze that takes the eye a moment or two to focus upon and recognise as it emerges out of the allusive haze. Each new recognition of an old landmark, every known route worn by muscle memory through a slightly unfamiliar vista is a patteran in itself, each crossed twig a portal to a memory of something gone before, softly laid down as in a scrap book so that the edges have become blurred and made us wonder what is now actual memory and what is the blurred bleeding of imagination into the margins of the actual.
I glance up to see a wind-riffled cluster of leaves gently swaying and am immediately transported back to the quick, theatrical head-turns and gasps of fairy hunting in Afan Argoed country park with my daughter when she was younger: “Elle, did you see that?!” “Look, there’s one!” her mother and I would call, as she was always just a little too slow to see one in flight for herself, flicking her head this way and that with expectant gasps. The smell of new growth mingled with the mulch of last year buries me again in the countless foliage-tunnels and dens of my youth, where my friends and I hunkered down at the heart of some dense shrub, a few comics and sweets enough to sustain us in our hidey-holes. The gentle swish of wind in the bushes washes over me like the soundtrack to nearly a quarter of a century of a life that my wife and I have built together, so many summer breezes riffling through the garden plants and trees that have grown with us and endured those years, the bad along with the good, and still stand rooted, firm as ever.
Every single one of these things is now kick-starting into life as spring inches across the land, rebuilding life in a way that feels similar, yet not quite the same, a million indefinable differences giving newness to the old and keeping the journey interesting, even if we don’t always know where it might lead us.
