Echoes of falling
Blossom, new leaves and the seasons as your calendar
I have been thinking a lot about blossom; I do not want it to leave. Already the confetti of it is falling - as I walk pink petals decorate the path, as I drive there’s a flurry and suddenly a burst of white swirls across the tarmac. Already the leaves are here, tightly furled, rolled in on themselves like a perfect cigar, still stick with sap. I am sad to see the flowers go, though it makes me think of this poem by Ada Limon, and this poem gives me hope.
The thing is, I still want rest. I want beauty and colour to look at passively - I don’t yet have the energy for the rush of new life. I want to, but I am not there yet. For me, it is still winter, still hibernation, still only the vague stirrings of colour and light that signal the new start. It is nearly here, but not yet, not quite, not for me. I still long to sleep. Perhaps I must make my own season, my own calendar to live by, that is fed more by instinct than by counting off days, weeks, months.
Blossom is so beautifully brief. It makes me think of time and how it keeps on moving, however much we will it to stay. And yet it is also not as standard a thing as we like to think. There are two trees in my garden that blossom. One is now mostly leaves; the other has not yet begun. Every year I worry that this tree is sick, that it will not flower. Every year it does, to its own timetable.
This weekend I spent one night in a country house that used to be a Second World War camp for high ranking German officials. There was a fake aristocrat called Lord Aberfeldy, really a spy, who befriended them, hoping they would let their guard down, let something slip. Hidden away, in the basement, were listeners; German Jews for the most part, who listened to the men above through microphones hidden in the walls. Even the trees had microphones; everything was listening.
We live so constantly with echoes of the past, with all the lives that came before. Think of all the people who have trodden where you tread now, the people who lived in your house, who followed the same track as you through the woods, who stood on a bank watching a bird whose ancestor you look at now, from the same muddy bank. So often they don’t even cross our minds. So often we are so consumed with our own concerns that all that came before is, if noticed at all, nothing but a back drop. But perhaps, when we pay attention to the rhythms of before, look at them with todays eyes, perhaps that is where our stories come from.
And yet the layering continues, spring after spring after spring. I went for a walk in the crisp sun of early morning, out from this house, along the edge of the valley. I looked out over rolling hills and the still water of the river below. There were bluebells in the woods, hundreds of them.
My bluebells at home have not yet arrived. The rhythms, even the natural ones, that hold the year in place are not solid, shiftless. They, which once rooted us, change from place to place, change with each coming years as the world grows hotter and the seas rise. For many of us, they are hardly noticed now. There are too many years when I have missed the delicate flowering of my cherry tree, hidden behind the green leaves of the plum. And yet, for all we ignore them, for all we forget the springs before, perhaps this shifting thing is the best way we have of marking the turning year. Better than months made by man, better than the changing of the clocks. The rhythms around us have been here since there were spies in the basement of this country house. They were different then as they will be in another 80 years. But they are more real, more rooted, than any calendar that we cling to.
It always takes me a long time to shake off the winter too. Go slow. Lovely writing 💚
“Blossom is so beautifully brief. It makes me think of time and how it keeps on moving, however much we will it to stay.” The blossoming’s ephemerality adds to its beauty and poignance. We never can hold on to what is beautiful, can we? x