Wonderful Wednesday #111

The reassuring reliability of Spring and some small joys from lately.

She’s a frilly one!

Only last week I cycled my usual route to work through a local park and stopped to admire the crocus that neatly line the path each year. Every single year they take me by surprise. Their leafy shoots blending in with the green of grass that has yet to see its first cut and is so often still dusted with frost. As if by magic and maybe even overnight; this very same patch becomes dotted with egg-yolk yellow and bright purple striped crocus flowers. They dot, dot, dot neatly along the edge of the path and you can spot them right from the other side of the park. Their colours are bright and saturated—strangely tropical even— and such a stark contrast to the rest of the trees, branches and land around them which are largely colourless and still tucked up asleep.

Everything else has barely budded yet and you can only spot the littlest nubs of life along the bare branches if you really look for them. Underneath the ground I know that the roots of these sleepy flora and fauna are unravelling and stretching out: Looking for warmth, and for water and, that most of their precious energy is spent building the strong foundations that will soon bring more leaves and buds and colour and, life.

Nature is magical.

Only a week or so later, the crocus begin to curl up, to wilt and to flatten. In their place the grass seems greener and before I can feel too sad, I am distracted by the sunshine yellow daffodils that seem to have shot up and flowered all of a sudden and seemingly everywhere. Soon they’ll wilt and wither swell and then it’ll be the turn of magnolia and soon they’ll be too many new blooms to count or to keep track of.

It’s all part of a cleverly orchestrated and mostly silent Spring symphony that plays quietly along in the background each year and, all around us almost like clockwork. Each and every year I’m still awe of it all and surprised by it as if I have never seen it before. Each year I think Spring is more beautiful, more clever, more genius than the year before it. It comes when we need it most and reminds us that there is beauty in resilience and routine and, when so much of our world feels unpredictable and uncertain I realise how much more this means to me.

Still pretty.

There have been many bright ‘bits’ this week. Easy-to-spot-and-count things because there is more light and more time to spot them in but, also because there is no denying how much lighter and brighter these days not only look but also feel to me too.

Here a few of them:

1 Pup walks that last longer. Less waiting for the light and more almost nearly waking up to it on a working week day. This means our morning walks can last a little longer and we can walk a little further and on the really lovely days, rest our faces in some early morning sunlight too. That and still enough time to get home for porridge and a cycle in to work! There is joy in a morning that simply feels less rushed but is actually just much the same.

2 Good bread. I don’t eat a lot of bread. Mostly because I’d rather just eat really really nice bread and really nice bread is expensive. I tell myself I’ll get better at making it myself but, alongside all of the other jobs and errands and responsibilities that seem to pile up each week, an odd loaf of soda bread is about all i can manage in the time I have. This week we did a bread run to one of our favourite places and stocked up the freezer for the next few weeks. I’m trying my hardest not to eat bread with everything because I can! Sometimes there is no greater joy than really good bread and really good butter. Don’t even get me started on toast….

3 Honey and tahini swizzled over my morning porridge alongside a clatter of frozen blueberries. Perfectly sweet and bitter and delicious all at once and all i want to eat as the days start to stretch out.

4 Line-dried washing. I hang our washing out all year anyway, save for the really wet and wild days but there is nothing like trapping the smell of Spring in duvet covers and pillowcases and subsequently filling the house with the smell on a Sunday evening whilst you air it all out for the week ahead.

5 Open windows. She’s a great big Spring cliche this week! The days have been a tussle between the end of winter and true Spring - we even awoke to frost at the weekend— but you bet I have flung open those windows at any opportunity in fact only last weekend I sat with a cup of tea in the garden and the cleaned and mopped all of downstairs with the patio doors open. Spring is the time where even the littlest things feel new and lovely all over again, don’t they…?

What littler moments and newly-forgotten things are you most grateful for these days? I’d so love for you to share. I hope wherever you are, that Spring has found you too and, that you’re managing to enjoy some of the simple joys it brings.

Tufts + a 4pm still-blue sky!