The days of late have been English-hot.  We sit outside in the daytime and my dreams at night are infused with the images from other people’s stories.  Climbers on snowy Oxford rooftops.  A weather balloon in Padua.  African pelicans.  I wear my panama hat even indoors because it reaffirms the season.  This is the hat I bought to go to Morocco, I say, because once it was just a ladies’ hat in Marks and Spencer but the second I laid eyes upon it, two years ago almost, it became part of the journey.  A traveller’s portable shade.

Yesterday we fixed my bicycle, swept the entrance to the house, pulled weeds up, had an impromptu barbecue.  In the jungle of knee-high, hip-high grass that’s blossomed in our garden, frogs leaped from blade to blade and the smoke dissapeared into the dusky blue.  From the garden pathway, looking away from the house, towards the sun dipping, the trees heavy with their summer leaves, this might be anywhere.  This might be miles away, no, worlds away from anywhere else.  An island of green and smoke; a paradise for the dispossessed.  Very Heart of Darkness, I say, only cheerier.

We still haven’t unpacked from Wales, though we’ve been back a week.  As if it’s summer now, so that’s okay.  Seasonal lethargy, the usual wanderlust of these months.

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Bare legs under a dress. The itch of grass touching skin.  The way it feels to be in a city where you have absolutely no sense of direction or context, except perhaps a ten-year-old memory that is mostly hidden by the cobwebs of the mind and characterized, when it does glint, by the utterly mundane.  What a long, straight road looks like.  That a little bit of height, in a country such as this, gives you more perspective than you think you deserve.  Lots of people in a tiny kitchen.  That the garden, though it may have slept through winter, needs tending again.  The importance of a good book.  A bath, a trashy magazine, wet fingerprints left all over the celebrities’ faces.  How wild and fickle a strong wind can make you.

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It’s officially springtime.  We can’t deny it: the flowers are in full bloom, the trees are gaining leaves again, and it’s dribbling a constant stream of irritating but not spectacular rain this holiday weekend.  We’ve successfully emerged from yet another winter, scarred, shivering, pale like ghosts but oh so ready to enter a heady few months of bare legs, punting, and cider on ice (or, alternatively, wet jeans, debates about whether or not to turn the heater on, and endless cups of tea).  The ice-cream truck is bravely making its rounds again, and I can promise that by June I will be so tired of hearing its little ditty that I’ll start to actually resent the warmth I spent so long dreaming of in darkest January.  The sunlight stays until nearly 8 o’clock, and I’ve  begun to wander the streets again, with my iPod and a vague but mutable destination.

And it’s baseball season.  This has been as impossible to ignore, even from the cozy, television-free rooms of our East Oxford house, as it ever was when I lived so close to Fenway Park that I could hear the shouts of the fans from my bedroom (one summer the boom from a celebratory flyover left me thinking for an instant that a bomb had gone off somewhere).  But by baseball season, what I really mean is Red Sox season.  I’m starting to think that there’s an unspoken brotherhood of people who lived in Boston and left, who experience at this time of year variations on a strange but similar nostalgia for the hum of those first few games, concurrent with the first few really nice days of the season when everyone leaves their cramped and frigid apartments for the hills of the Boston Common and the people-watching on Newbury street.  Sudden throngs, bare-armed for the first time in months, stroll past shoestores full of sandals, gather en masse at JP Licks or Emack and Bolio’s.  Near Fenway they start selling “Yankees Suck” infant onesies and “Jeter sucks A Rod” t-shirts with great gusto, and the streets are littered not with patches of urine-stained snow but discarded flyers, programs, plastic cups.  In the thick evening air you can hear shouts of glee or of rage, see the white glow of stadium lights.  You can smell cheap beer and burgers, and suddenly all you want is a cheap beer and a burger, too.

I never liked baseball any more than a girl should.  I was restrained in my enthusiasm for it, sometimes bordering on apathetic.  But I confess to feeling a sort of elation, probably more tied to that which was human than that which was sport-related, when the Red Sox won their first world series in over 80 years.  I had moved to Boston only a few months previous, so my introduction to the city, really, was the crowds that took to the streets; when we beat the Yankees in the playoffs, subway cars filled with people yelling “Yankees Suck!” in almost military unison, and I still wonder if maybe the green line train didn’t make it to Kenmore on the power of excitement alone.  When they won it again a few years later you could actually taste a strange disappointment in the air; Red Sox fans, perhaps a little like England football fans, are attached to their suffering, and the win was too soon, they hadn’t had time yet to finish celebrating the 2004 victory, let alone settle into a rhythm of loss and frustration.  

I don’t follow the sport much now; but it follows me.  Casual references from other bloggers, on twitter, facebook, all the things that keep us weirdly connected to worlds we thought we’d left, remind me even on this rainy Oxford afternoon of what baseball season in Boston feels like.

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There are strange flowers blooming.  I’m watching the almost-rainy day unfold in the back garden (the dead-rat smell has dissipated enough now to make the study a viable place to spend time again).  It’s heavenly: things are green, or starting to be green.  The grass has new, fragile vibrancy; the trees, which have looked naked for so long, are budding tiny leaves at long last.  Weeds are springing up in the flower pots and when the wind ruffles branches and stalks it’s easy to believe that things out there are alive.  That maybe we’ll all start to thaw out, now.

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The city this morning was heartbreakingly beautiful. Puffy clouds and air so fresh you could drink it (I seem to have a thing about this). I detoured, went gliding down Broad Street and curled up St. Giles so that I could buy a sandwich and a pastry from a cheerful woman. Traffic, thick traffic, all the way towards town, but the roads away from town were clear and the city in spite of the traffic still had that air of Easter emptiness. I saw a girl in a striped shirt-dress and boots pedalling towards the Bodleian, her basket laden with bags and books, and thought how lovely it would be to have woken up early just to work in a library, to come out into the sun at intervals like a young stalk needing to photosynthesize, to maybe have tea later at the Vaults & Gardens cafe, outside in the graveyard where the chairs overlook tombs and flowers and the yellow-bodied dome of the Radcliffe Camera.

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