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For the longest time the ground was hard and covered in frost. There is nothing and nothing and nothing and then, little purple and yellow shoots. Tiny little evergreen leaves emerge from the bitten ground and the air is gentler, slightly muggy, when I come off the train on a Monday morning. Cold, but not bitter cold.
We’re back where we started, saying the same sentence everybody knows all too well: Spring is just around the corner. The days are longer. Summer is a stone's throw away.
All along mud-scuffed sidewalks, the trees bloom white and pink and the roads swell in blooming bundles of crocuses and tulips and daffodils and bluebells. The air smells a bit reminiscent of dirt, but there’s something else beneath the surface, evocative of rainy days or afternoons spent gardening.
A spring day in the city just happens. You walk outside one day and realise that the heavy coat you chose to wear is going to be a sweatbox. I left work at five o’clock and found myself walking in twilight hour, the sky not yet plunged into darkness. My spirits lifted a bit as I sped past an ice cream truck daring to open. Doesn’t he know it? Spring hasn’t arrived yet, this is simply a false start.
My phone reminds me that this time five years ago I was in Provincetown, Massachusetts and a blizzard hit the coastal town. Snow banked the streets and icicles covered lobster traps. The only pair of shoes I had were converse. I was sick of cold weather and through my own stubbornness, I was sure I could force the good weather to arrive earlier. I wanted to be encased in the sun’s embrace. I focused on the little flowers and the sludgey ground, telling myself that spring was just around the corner, that this blizzard wouldn’t last forever.
The landscape is grey and bleak until it explodes. While most people might love London for its architecture, I’m not a city person and consider it to be rather ugly; on the days when I think it to be beautiful, it’s because of the weather. The way the light hits the side of the buildings and illuminates the side streets in speckles of warm gold, the same way when light hits a disco ball the dancefloor becomes a spectacle to stand beneath. I suppose that it’s a beautiful city when you consider its context, beautiful under the burst of dancing yellow daffodils that sway in the wind.
I feel myself talking about the weather, as if in some way, it acknowledges the time that is passing by, as if each month that passes, each change in weather ticks us closer to something else.
Spring comes to London even when London is gross and muggy and depressing to live in. The trees will continue to bloom, the green shoots clawing their way out of the soil, and on the days that I can’t figure what the hell to wear, Spring will crawl through the window nonetheless. It will arrive whether or not we are ready for it, it comes around the same time every year and every year we remark it as something new to behold. If nothing changes in my life, the one thing I do know is that the tulips will arrive in March, the crocuses and bluebells before that. That is the constant in my life.
The day unfolds in an expanse of blue, fending off the night’s arrival for a few more hours. The crowds gather by Tower Bridge on my way home, they move in toward the streets, bright and eager and ordinary. Spring is here.