Yellow

On waking up.

I worried it wouldn’t come - the spring in my step, the wake from hibernation. How (I asked myself in winter) will I stand in front of people to talk about my book? I was just about managing the school gate chat. Then, the scales tipped in favour of light and I laced my boots. I needed some inspiration.

If March had a colour, it would be yellow: gorse, lesser celandine, male willow catkins, the odd spray of forsythia gone rogue. I walk to the lake and find heaps of badger fur among the shiny bluebell leaves. It is scattered across the forest like ashes, snagged on fern fronds and clumped around the base of a hazel. A vicious badger brawl, two males most likely, tearing strips off one another in defence of their territory. I pocket a handful for fly-tying and picture the keen trout that will sink the mottled nymph.

Resident birds dominate the soundscape before the migrants arrive. Wren, robin and blackbird in the scrub; chaffinch sounding his one clear note; croak of raven; great tit calling ‘teacher, teacher’ from the leafless trees. The hooded crows fly with full beaks to the ash at the lake then yell at me to scram. I ignore them and undress. The water hits like a slap, waking me from my stupor, setting me upright again. I am stunned. No sooner than I am on the bank, towelling my limbs, than I am back for more, a glutton for punishment.

With body ablaze I walk on, past the stoppered spring from which water flows all winter, left at fox-scat boulder, around the water’s edge where a slick of frog spawn is banked, and into the woods. Last year sparrow hawks raised two strong fledglings who hunted like clumsy teenagers among the hazel. I watched them hone their flight skills and one flew so close I felt the downdraft of its wing. I see no evidence of a nest so on I go, my ear inclined, my eyes wide open.

I am fully converted to earth’s intelligence. In winter we lit our fire every day and I never strayed far from its warmth. I welcomed it all: silence, inertia, early nights and late mornings, the craving for good bread (and stew/poached fruit/celeriac with lots of cream), brief walks between showers, watery winter light - the way it spills and dilutes, whatever was bare, forsaken, numb. I rubbed against it like a cat; I befriended grief. Then, I let it all go the way trees shed, safe in the knowledge that nothing is ever lost, it simply rots and feeds my roots.

Now, a single bright day in March sets me spinning, dizzy from sap rising and the size of a bumblebee queen. I cannot stop seeing life and its unconquerable beauty. How it greens the fiddleheads then races to rouse primrose, violet and wood anemone before the trees leaf and steal their light. You might think that’s mist rising from the water only to realise the duck fly have hatched from their hole on the lakebed. Think of all the happy fish dozing in cold water who wake to such a feast.

I am relieved to reach the hill where hawthorn looks on and find that I feel the quickening too. A strategy becomes clear; this is how to emerge - with brag of blossom and strut of starling, the indecency of iris and its underground rhizomes. With dandelion roar. Just like an eager hawk. As earth’s most multiple, excited daughter¹.

You’re invited!

1. From Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘Spring’.