Spring-Bringing / Temporal Translocations
Spring-Bringing / Temporal Translocations
I’m writing this short chicken-scratch scribble on a train from London to Glasgow, where the fluorescent lighting and complex fug of other people’s perfume have concocted the perfect blend of headache inducing haze. The shock of emergence from Finnish forest-field-friends into a sensorily overloading transport and people filled ‘reality’ is jarring. It hurts my teeth to not be deeply sequestered among slow budding birch. To not be listening to four different members of the Turdus bird family sing over the top of each other like karaoke at 4:30am. To not be transfixed by a fizzing (and biting) ant-hill to which I am compelled to give tiny pieces of food to every morning. They especially liked watermelon. So did I.
In this period of time-zone and growing region hopping, I managed to find three springs. I landed at TUO TUO in two feet of slowly receding snow, replete with squirrel footprints and fieldfare footprints and the footprints of a cat called PJ. Naked branches bud-studded and snow laden. The spring I’d left behind in Glasgow was beginning to burst – hawthorns heaving with proto-blossoms and timidly emerging yellow dandelions and daffodils just starting to turn into floppy and nodding wet-yet-dry effigies. The spring at my parents, deep in the Essex countryside, had sped through apace – deep in itself and close to summer. Blossoms had given way to sturdy deep green leaves, the horse chestnuts smothering pathways and airways in sticky pollen, wheat spikes pushing ramrod upward. My mum points me to ground ivy, jack-of-the-hedge, and ox-eye daisies. My dad shows me the patches of moss making blanket-homes in the corners of the garden.
The spring at TUO TUO was still enrobed in stasis, a dormant watching-waiting. Amidst this takatalvi (a blackthorn winter), I mimicked stasis, until I couldn’t. May Day, Vappu in Finland, drove me to lead a wassail for a lonely deer-antler-scratched apple tree. Pouring cider on roots and balancing cider-soaked local bread into its small arms, avoiding the deep cambial scars through to its heartwood, we clattered pots and pans and yelled into the sky. Last year it gave one singular apple. Maybe this year it might bring two.
I dyed scraps of fabric with hot turmeric water, plunging my hands excitedly into the near boiling yellow liquid to make ribbons for the youngest birch. In Finland there are endless birches, many not yet entering their silvering years, many firmly footed in between, and a few hollowing themselves inside out by way of bark beetle and woodpecker. Kaitlyn of TUO TUO finds silver birches to be great exhibitionists, constantly peeling back their papery bark to show you what’s underneath; creating of us birch voyeurs each time we climb through the bryophytic underbrush. They’d pulled on fuzzy-leaved jackets by the time I left, but we knew what they were up to. We tied our ribbons and ate flame-licked corn and drank sima.
The ground elder was first to crest above the straw after the snow melt-vaporated under the equally unseasonable hot sun that followed. Starting in a culvert, every time you blinked it crept, crept, crept, until the dry yellow straw left by the snow was green-dipped and then green-dripping. Then there was nettle, and dandelion, and yarrow, and meadowsweet, wood sorrel, wood anemone, lupine, lady’s mantle, clover, coltsfoot, mare’s tail, fireweed, blue-straw-rasp-berries. Then followed the swallows, the whooper swans, barnacle geese, finches, tits, siskins, wagtails, cuckoos, warblers, chiffchaffs. Joni of TUO TUO lights up as he finds brass-carapaced beetles, fuzzy-legged weevils, and lumbering bumblebees drunk on new nectar. On my birthday before the sun rises, I massage together equal parts lupine and sugar and leave it to ferment.
The rattling rapid rain visits compel me to strip and lie naked on the what-once-was-a-football-field, rolling in lupine and moss-beds. The what-once-was-a-football-field is now a shimmering ecotone – wildflower meadow studded with Scot’s Pine saplings not yet two years old. Every year they creep further away from the treeline, a gentle and stubborn succession in action. Later, another artist, K&J and I lie down in a subtle cubensis haze and watch a cathedral of cone-laden silver firs pulsing in heavy wind as we French-braid straw grass. The wind becomes so strong it rolls the carefully balanced smooth granite stones off their altars.
The same night, the strongest solar storm in a century smashes into the earth’s atmosphere. Awake purely by the strength of a 9pm double espresso, I (foolishly) wander into the cerulean blue and rapidly clearing night. Neglecting to put on the right clothing, I stumble outside without a torch but with a cardigan but without gloves but with socks but only with sandals. Purple silks across the sky. Green flickers underneath. My body hair stands on end, only maybe because of the cold. I follow my feet down a freshly laid cement path to the end of the lake.
The cement wasn’t there yesterday, and is only there today because twenty middle aged birch and spruce were sliced down and the stumps were ground out over the past week, ripping up the forest floor and canopy. I take extra care sinking my feet with all my weight with each step into the still-wet cement. I diligently press found cones and fallen branches in as deep as the material yields. I watch my first aurora with electric awe, not noticing my fingers are white and my snot is frozen to my nose. The cement is set the next day, much like my intentions were the night before.
On my last night, two hares zig-zag between the entrance and the fir-tree cathedral. They run laps round the house and stare directly at me. I strain my sticky sweet lupine ferment into a jar we had the lid for but can’t find the lid for; biofertiliser for the next year, and the next spring.
Travelling forward in spring-time finds me back in Essex, bluebells are now blue-seed-pods, mahonia is flowering and fruiting, and the nodding foxglove sentinels guarding my parent’s front door are awash with pollinators. As I sit on the train north to Glasgow, surrounded now by Scotland’s forest-factory grid-planted firs, I travel back in spring-time again, into the in-between, unsure of which plants will greet me, and which plants have already passed me by.