The poets couldn’t agree about April. From abroad Browning wrote, Oh to be in England, now that April’s here. Eliot wasn’t as convinced, April is the cruellest month, he said. I remember April cruelties, all the losses down the years that seemed to congregate around the springtime, which means they linger in all those anniversaries. The goddess of taking was kinder this year, she got in early with her sorrows, scattered them through March. None the easier for the shifting of date, but also…maybe a reason to celebrate this April in more Browningian mode.
My calendar is full of platitudes about every day being a good day and how the simplest of things are the ones that matter. My journal is (not full, but) scattered with yes, buts to all of that. The truth is that even those of us who are fundamentally, confirmedly, committedly focussed on the good stuff, don’t always see it. Or we see it and don’t feel it.
In my better moments I know that this is just a matter of not taking enough time with it.
Speaking of two people and their impact on my life, a friend said that one had crashed into my life and the other had simply flowed into all the spaces. I love that analogy – not least because it is absolutely spot on, but also because the crash caused damage that had to be cleared up afterwards while the flow changes with the seasons but flows on still. There’s another piece to write about that another time, for now the relevance is that the same applies to the negative and the positive in my life in a more general way. The negative crashes in and has to be managed, dealt with, tidied up afterwards, processed, repaired etc. The positive flows through, often so quietly that I forget to notice, forget to harvest, forget to capture and release, forget to spend the time and energy immersing myself in it.
Take April, just as a for instance. I can talk about each and every anniversary of this month and relive all the sadnesses. I have done that. I do not want to do it anymore. I want to reclaim April as a month of Spring, a rebirth month, a month of happy moments.
I write those words and realise that the only way to do it is literally in moments. Also to forget all those amazing writers who move to Ireland and live off the land, all the ones who live closer to my home but have been obsessed with birds, or fish, or fungi, or something since they were children. I live in the suburbs and I have never been obsessed enough with anything for long enough to make a story of it, for it to make a writer of me.
When it comes to all the big ideas, the philosophical disciplines, even my own writing projects, it may be time to confess that I’m a flirt. I may never commit deeply enough. I’m sorry. There it is. I will keep trying…but I do have a tendency to go A.w.o.L. I have too many ideas…and I leap into each one until I’m drowning, then I start swimming, kick for the shore, haul out and have to rethink it all again. That’s tomorrow’s job.
Today’s is simply beginning to reclaim April. In moments.
Just before the month begins (yes, allow me some leeway), I start a new journal. It is a bright blue Flame Tree notebook, its cover design based on Terns on the Tide by Kate Heiss. It’s a picture of sea and diving birds and fish and bright reflected light. I haven’t been to the sea this month yet, so I’ll take instead a notebook that lets me feel the waves.
I paste pictures into the unprinted lead pages. Dahlias and Sunflowers, by Anna Perlin and one of Jackie Morris’s doves…both snipped from Resurgence magazine…one of my own: a close-up shot of violets…
…because they are growing along the edge of my front path, pale lilac and small and fragile – facing off the more robust, deeper mauve of the dog violets that underdove the wall to rise again in the driveway.
Flowers in my garden. First to emerge are the grape hyacinth that are spreading in a deep blue wildfire, front and back. To be fair, when I up-root their bulbs from the pathways where I don't want them, I do simply chuck them up the lawn edge where they can take their chances. Plump lusciousness that brings me to my knees to try imagine being tiny and walking among them as if they were a tree-height forest.
Two days of warmth were all it took for the forget-me-not to give it a go. They’re slow this year and may be outcompeted, but I wait in hope for their full return. Dandelions exploded ‘into wishes’ as a child somewhere said, according to an internet post I read.
The peach tree is coming into leaf, and so the gingko. The pear is risking leafing and blooming at the same time. Peach lost all her flowers to a downpour. Apple bides her time.
I write poems – albeit sad ones – and send them out into the wild.
I walk my local patch, camera in hand, partly because it makes me look more closely in the way I wish a notebook did but doesn’t.
I find comfrey, the white variety that grows both in my garden and along the hedgerow. I learn that it is non-native, brought in from the Caucasus, a rich source of potassium for fertiliser but liver toxic if ingested. It also takes me back to the character in the Duncton Chronicles, which I really must re-read.
Into the wood and the swathe of blue that precedes the bluebells, the overlooked apennine anenome – another non-native, but welcome! – and the few patches of white wood anemones growing among them. This is parkland not wild wood. I’m sure these flowers were planted deliberately… but their growing is all their own, which is wild enough for me.
The same is true of the glory of the snow (scilla forbesii) that grace the edges of the main road with their blue & white star shine.
In the walled garden the magnolia is in all her glory, deep-veined-pink fading to white, internal combs of deep russet through pale green…somebody tell me how this amazing flower gave its name to a paint colour that is basically three-day-old milk.
Overnight rain has left droplets that hold on to petals and leaves. Sam would have loved this.
There is a bench against an old brick wall. The wall is bemossed and lichened, the bench also, and scattered with fallen petals. Missing bricks ask if anything has found a nesting spot within the spaces.
One morning, I look out of the window to see the crow-pair bringing their breakfast to my lawn. Each blue-black bird has a whole piece of toast in its beak. They land from somewhere, at the end of the drive, and walk up and round the path onto the lawn. I get too close to the window and one hops up onto the wall, so I step back. (S)he comes back down again and I leave them to eat in peace.
Crow. On my earlier-in-the-week walk, the one that caught my attention was on the ground. Eating meat. Pulling flesh and long stringy sinews from some once-feathered thing. A lot of feather, pigeon-coloured, spread over the grass by the picnic tables. No sign of the original killer. Fox? Domestic dog? Car? All possible…who knows if this was even the murder site. Crow didn’t care. A meal is a meal. Crow kept eating, ignoring me.
The other one, the one making all the noise, was on the window ledge of the top floor of the Enterprise Centre, tapping on the window and making demands that were clearly going ignored. Demanding to be let in – or involved in some unanswered dispute with its own reflection? I couldn’t say.
I could remember Richie Black-crow. Another bird on another window ledge. Richie sat on the sill of the top floor of Milton block, where we were being drilled in the romances of Tess and Clare and Wordsworth and – in my case at least – resenting every single second of dissection and deconstruction. It would take decades and more instinct and less academia for me to finally find my way into poetry. Richie is long-gone, and I doubt the long-suffering Mr Potter is still around either, but maybe, maybe he wasn’t that much older than we were.
In my mind and memory Richie came to a whole term’s worth of English lessons. He probably didn’t. It might have only been one or two. Did someone open the window – it would have been Chris or Toddy – they had that corner – did the bird hop across the threshold and cock his head to look at Potter and the scribbles on the blackboard? I want to think so, but in my more rational moments I know I’m making that bit up.
I wonder if, half a century later, anyone else from that year group even remembers the crow – not only the crow, but the room, the lessons, the smell of chalk dust, the quotations we crammed to get through exams that may or may not have made a difference to our lives. They did to mine, but I can’t speak for anyone else in that room the day or days the crow came knocking at the window.
Back in the garden, I wonder what to do with the little robin, the Geranium purpureum, also known as purple cranesbill…I’ve beenpulling it up from the gravel…it keeps coming back...should I give up and let it grow, should I keep pulling and then pot? The one in flower today shares a weedy pot with a dandelion. It occurs to me that I could grow weed pots.
I check the potato bags…they need fertilising and recomposting and I remember to be grateful for all the rain.
I put away thoughts of the garden and set myself to belated tai chi practice. And remember to welcome the rain that begins to fall.
