On the way to work, sudden blossoms. They came overnight. First the delicate yellow flowers outside our front door, now, on the trees, a bloom of white. It’s warm enough to cycle in ballet flats, no socks–that’s a good warm, it’s all I’d ask of March. Yesterday, we ate lunch outside, in the garden.

With these sudden blossoms comes, too, a sudden remembrance of my love for the city. I hope this infusion of affection seeps into the work I’m doing on the book. The freeze of winter has made me cold about the project, not lacking in theoretical enthusiasm but lacking in the ability to translate thought into word. I’ve been drawn into myself like a creature curled in its own shell. I wouldn’t want to make this malady specific, wouldn’t want it to lose its poetry by pinpointing it preciesely, giving it a name, say, Seasonal Affective Disorder. Then again, perhaps it’s like the aquisition of a degree: Miranda Ward, GAD, SAD. (Or, indeed, like a Dr. Seuss rhyme).

But I don’t think it’s like this. I think what I feel in winter is a choice. I like to wrap myself in the cocoon of my own worries, like to hibernate in my study, fretting, picking at my own fingers, sighing, watching the naked trees, thinking that my projects are languishing, my ability shrinking. It makes the transition to Spring sweeter, makes me feel like, as soon as the blossoms come, I can shed my ugly countenance, wear something nicer for the Summer.

I wasn’t always like this. I’m a California girl, you see; not obsessed with seasons, not even aware of them except for the changes in light and the subtle shift of colour. I write this often, so it must be important to me. I write, often, too, of how my time in Boston made me aware of something I’d never known before, about my own reaction to the malleability of days, my own obsession with the weather. (The Man says that when I enthuse about temperature or sun or rain in the way that I can, sometimes, I become in that moment almost perfectly British.)

But still, here we are, at the edge. I’m hoping that the expanding sunlight makes the work, too, expand, so that it fills the days like blossoms and warmth. Punting weather, garden weather.

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I suddenly feel weary with the anticipation of a Saturday. Here I am at my desk, which is not a proper desk but a slab of coarse wood, which used to be the kitchen table, staring out at the garden behind the house thinking thoughts of Springtime, Springtime which is still just beyond our reach. There are yellow flowers and a few misty buds, but the trees are still blank, the grass still pale, the dead leaves of last year still plastered to the frosty pathway.

We’re in the time-between-seasons; you wake up one morning and here it is, Spring, and you put on a light coat, you dispense of your winter boots, but by mid-afternoon it’s Winter again and shivering you cycle home against a fierce wind that belongs to January, not March.

I need a chair big enough to swallow me. I don’t want to sit at my desk with my legs crossed neatly, dangling toward the ground, I want to fold them beneath myself, I want them to have freedom and space. The thing is of course that none of this furniture is ours, but now that we’ve lived here–how long? nearly two years?–it fits us. It owns us if we don’t own it.

I think about this sometimes (I’ve probably written about it before, too). What anchors us to this house is not possession. All that we own, between us, is a bed. You could say that’s too symbolic to be true, but it is true, and the only reason we even own the bed is because some friends were getting rid of it and thought that maybe we would want to graduate from a folding futon to a proper mattress-and-headboard bed.

So we have a bed and our books. We sound portable. But I don’t think we are as portable as all that. Here is the site of our budding love. How do you take that with you when you go?–say, the memory of sitting on the kitchen floor, midnight, two weeks in, picking apart a chicken carcass from the fridge, sipping a gin and tonic; the memory of the first walk to the bus stop, the smell of early summertime and the sunlight and the way he puts his sunglasses over your eyes because it’s early and you need a shield, and a piece of insurance, something to tie you together.

Because the thing is that while we’re here, they aren’t just memories; I can actually see a two-years-younger version of ourselves sitting in the garden watching the nine o’clock sunlight fade behind the East Oxford terraced houses. I haven’t actually converted these things into memory yet. I know I need to start doing it, like a computer caches old emails (if that’s what they do), or my mind will start to feel cloudy and crowded, but. But.

(A little truth about myself: sometimes I mix up Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth. And Henry David Thoreau, because of Walden Pond. All those Ws. Even though I’ve been to Walden Pond. One sticky Boston summer. I ate potato chips on the way there, bikini beneath black dress, and it was clear as anything but when we drove up to the pond the world suddenly clouded over and a few drops of rain hit our heads and then a crack of thunder, a fissure of lightening across the sky. So we didn’t swim in Walden Pond after all.)

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I have a new song obsession. These things come over me suddenly, and when they do, I pity anyone who has to share a house with me (in this case, the Man). Hearing the same rhythms over-and-over-again-for-hours-upon-hours. But it makes me more productive. Or maybe it’s that I obsess when I’m already feeling productive. I don’t know which and, frankly, the whole thing is weird enough that I don’t really know if I want to delve any deeper.

(Because you asked, here’s my current favorite. Click on “Golly Sandra” to hear what my house sounds like at the moment.)

A lot of people recently have said to me, “I don’t know where the autumn went, how is it already a new year, how is it already mid-March?” and I’ve been saying back, “I don’t know, but I feel the same way.” As humans, we’re incapable of processing time in the way we think we’re supposed to. But then I looked at my calendar and I realized that I probably feel this way because I had something happening EVERY FREAKING DAY IN NOVEMBER. Sometimes poetry doesn’t explain things as well as I like to think.

Lately, I’ve been on a constant sock-and-stocking hunt. I’ve actually altered outfits because I can’t find the right garments for my feet. I don’t know where they go, exactly, but I do think I know what they’re telling me: it’s about time for Spring. Bare legs, bare feet.

Speaking of which–I’ve been seeing blossoms. Not fully-fledged, springtime-is-here blossoms, but the sweetest little buds. There are some by our front door. It’s nice.

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Today, I am overwhelmed by coincidence, and the sense that in its own weird little way, the world sometimes tries to say things–I don’t know what they mean, exactly, but there they are. First I am in the basement at work smelling of dust and sweat, looking at things that seem very old, and then I am reminded of all the unlikeliness in the world, and maybe, when I come back upstairs, I look a little shocked, but it doesn’t matter, because they’ll just ride it off to the cramped heat downstairs and anyway, it’s springtime now, and people are allowed to be a little crazy.

At home there is the biggest spider I think I have ever seen in my life tucked in one of the folds at the top of the curtains. I can’t reach it, but even if I could I’m not sure what I would do. I am afraid of it and fascinated by it; I neither want to disturb it nor do I especially want the threat of it hanging over me every time I enter the room. Still, it adds a strange thrill to the mundane.

So because of the spider, instead of sinking into the couch, I go out into the garden and chase the sun down the concrete path towards the vegetable patches; in my swimsuit, I sit on a backless red chair and read my book. I read up until the point when Antonia Quirke and Jonathon Marr have finally started speaking again and am so happy I start grinning, because from the way she writes it, they’re good together. People who are good together like that deserve to be together. Wait, I want to amend that: they need to be together. For not just their sake, but for everyone’s.

Inside it is cool and the spider is still there and I feel light, like I know something I didn’t when I woke up in morning. Is this what snooping feels like? No–this is what convergence feels like.

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It’s official.  I–to use a delicate and especially eloquent term–blow at regular blog updating.  Is it because I feel stretched thin between all the hard work I do at work (four hours a day is a long day indeed, after all, especially when it’s a mentally taxing job that involves filing paperwork, printing out certificates, invigilating English placement exams, sorting mail…I could go on…) and the hard work I do at my writing (essays don’t write themselves, obviously–as this blog is becoming a testament to!)?  Or is it because Spring, in some strange and elusive guise, is finally, almost, sort of, here?

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