The vernal equinox
My greatest quality is not intelligence or brilliance. Nor is it creativity, although I do have a rather alchemic ability to turn caffeine into words. It is certainly not attention to detail.
No, the thing that has got me through is endurance.
Like a mule, I put one foot in front of the other, only fleetingly lifting my head to look at the stars. This has stood me in good stead in many ways but never more so than in spending leisure time with my husband. He is an ex Royal Marine and his idea of fun is to fly to an inhospitable continent and cycle across it. Whenever I am unable to avoid accompanying him on adventures (on foot I hasten to add; we have been together for over fifteen years and I am still pretending that I never learned to ride a bike), I plod.
When I can bear it no longer, I ask if we are half way yet. Because I have an unerring belief that I can survive anything if I know when it will end. I can wait for time to pass, and I can endure, with varying levels of cheerfulness, something that I know will soon be over. And past halfway, the end is closer than the beginning, and every step is a step closer to a hot bath and a cup of tea. After halfway, I am coasting.
Winter is exactly the same. November has a bit of novelty to it, and December has Christmas. January and February are all bleak, featureless months with little to commend them beyond indoor narcissi and the unpredictable frisson of Valentine’s Day. I need a turning point. I need a marker to say that we’ve made it. Broken the back of the darkness and we can practically touch the warmth with the tips of our fingers.
And here it is. The vernal equinox. The almost imperceptible shift that happens when the night and day balance so perfectly, and then we topple headlong into bright, sharp, delighting mornings, and long, languorous, just-one-more-drink evenings in the orchard. The lightness stretches and the dark contracts, and there is growth and fresh wild garlic, and the sound of lawnmowers choking into life after the season of being left idle in the shed. I don’t feel the weight of winter when it is present, but I feel the lightness of its lifting. Then, just when the air starts to warm and the blossom starts to blossom, there is the smell.
I don’t know what the smell is. Maybe my ancestors did, maybe the scientists do. There is a theory that the human nose evolved to detect the chemical compounds that characterise healthy soil in the same way a shark’s nose evolved to detect a drop of blood in an ocean. It is not petrichor before you tell me it is. It isn’t even geosmin. It isn’t a scent that I detect with my nose, but with my whole body. It is the return of life itself.
I feel it first on my skin and then in my bones. I fizz like shaken champagne, and I am reminded of my very favourite PG Wodehouse quote:
"What a morning! Warm, fragrant, balmy, yet with just that nip in the air that puts a fellow on his toes. The yeast of spring is fermenting in my veins, and I am ready for anything."
Uncle Fred in the Springtime (1939)
It’s not just me though. Life and potential are everywhere I look. The leaves of the trees, the tips of the weeds pushing through the soil, the red of the returning peony buds, the seeds in the trays on my windowsill. Now is the time to start flinging seed around with abandon. If your ground is warm enough, the light has caught up so try a bit of direct sowing with some old seed or those spare packets that are going to languish for another year if you don’t use them up.
There is magic around the vernal equinox which means risks can pay off in unexpected ways. Old magic. Ask the cosmos for your wishes to come true.
I know what I’m wishing for and there’s champagne on ice. The equinox is the time for change.