Bog Myrtle & Peat

I was spoiled by three good springs. They came in a row when I was in my twenties, and I drank them up. I saw every turn and corner of the days which join March into May, and I found time for the smallest details. I discovered wheatear nests and slept in the reek of new burnt heather; I was up before dawn to see blackgame and roe bucks in that clattery moment before the sun comes up and ruins the day with blatancy. Nothing evaded me, and the hill was mine alone.

I kept a diary of those years, and each day is a standalone encyclopaedia. I marked the coming of every new bird and insect; martins on the 5th April, swallows on the 10^th, orange-tipped butterflies on the 19^th. I sketched up the pinpoint spot of every egg and flower, and hardly an hour went by indoors. That was the way things went, and I laid down this new wisdom in bundles like bank notes until I began to feel that I was getting rich.

Then it fell apart. We had a bad spring with a cold wind which blew my schedule out of sync. I realised that most of my “knowledge” had been based on regularity; my three years were only the same by coincidence. I’d begun to assume that trees grow in even spurts and the boom and bust of wild birds could be predicted like the corrugations in a sheet of tin. But the truth is that some years are good and others bad, and you only know that when you’ve seen a few. A rowan might grow a foot in one year when the weather is kind, and then fight to rise by three inches the next. It’s why trees are beautiful, but it showed me how wrong I’d been to see three years and think I’d done anything more than make a start. It takes a lifetime to know how a tree will grow.

And now I’m slightly older. I’ve got work to do, and a list of emails to send. I’ve lost those pools of bottomless time, and spring comes to me in a drip-feed between other projects. Five years have passed without a full connection, but I still imagine that every new spring will come in slow and steady tokes, with time to sample the song of every lark; each crackling rag of adder-skin. I spend each winter in hopeful expectation that another deep spring will come and rescue me, but then longer days come and my hands are too full to grasp them.

So I’m short-tempered, because I know how dearly these days can chime; I remember a time when I could throw myself into this place and never stop falling. For all I still love the birds and the rising grass, I’m only paddling where I used to swim. And I twist in the warming wind for all I’ve seen that now goes unnoticed.