A 60th spring and still so much new

There’s only the one subject. You can’t fail to have noticed. Your eyes and ears and fingertips have sensed it. Your skin has drunk at it. Even your bones can feel it. It’s spring.

The seasons are well named. The word summer pulses with heat. Autumn is quieter; its mellow open vowels announce that the engine is slowing. Winter’s thin, mean. It stabs like a blade. And spring, well, feel the energy coiled in its single syllable. It sounds like what’s out there now. It’s the show I’ve seen 60 times and not tired of, that I’ve written of before but that proves inexhaustible.

No season more reminds us of our kinship with the world, that we are made of the same stuff as daffodils are made of, or the flies that fizz round the dog’s old bone, or the dog indeed, or the bone, or the suddenly sprouting lawn. ‘‘All flesh is grass,’ sayeth the preacher,’ and for once the preacher sayeth true.

(Unlike the preacher who said last week that Trump had the moral authority to nuke North Korea if ever he feels like it. It’s all there in the Bible, said the preacher, citing chapter and verse. But people other than lunatic preachers have started to peel away from Trump. Mayors don’t want him in their cities. Organisers of awards nights don’t want him to attend. Bereaved mothers spurn his phone calls. Even the ghastly business bosses are starting to shun him for fear that they might lose sales. Soon Trump will have only evangelicals for company. And Klansmen. And he’ll go mad. Indeed he’s clearly halfway there already. But none of it matters a jot. Because it’s spring. Spring belittles Trump.)

As do my swallows. They’re back already, my welcome swallows, and never were birds better named. They came darting and swooping into the garage last weekend, squeaking and writhing and carving the air, just as they did when first I saw them, standing amazed with my old dog Baz.

But Baz has been dead 10 years or more, and swallows live only five years at best, so these can’t be the birds that Baz saw.

Rather they’re the offspring of those birds’ offspring, and you have to delight in that. And some, thanks to nature’s endless recycling, may even have bits of Baz in them. You have to delight in that too.

And the birds in the garage made me look at the garage and the stuff that’s accreted there over the winter, the disused stuff and the not-quite-broken and the may- come-in-useful that will never come in useful.

So next weekend, I shall fill the trailer and tow it all away, for this is the spring and spring starts clean.

There was a day last week when it felt we went overnight from winter to summer. And as the sun came over the ridge mid-morning I went out on the deck and I spread my arms to it, spread them like a pagan, giving as much of my flesh to the heat as I could. So did the dog.

Sliding off the chair where he’s coiled all winter, wrapped nose to tail in a wall of fur, he stretched out on the carpet in a lozenge of sunlight, and as the planet spun and the lozenge shifted, Blue shifted with it, chasing the spring over nylon carpet.

The evidence of spring surrounds the house. It’s a mass quickening, a bringing to life. Aristotle thought that the sun bred crocodiles straight from the mud of the Nile, that maggots grew from dead flesh, fleas from dust. It all seemed to make sense.

It still seems to make sense. Those flies that are fizzing today, where were they a week ago, what were they, how were they?

Flies, dogs, swallows, daffs, buds, they are spring’s unlimited children, born of the heat and the light and the land, and in spring more than ever they are all one.

On the flowering cherry the buds are now so full of juice they’re on the very point of bursting, bursting with petals the texture of tissue and the colour of finger nails.

And the daphne’s broadcasting perfume to all who’ll listen and the bottlebrush is covered with crimson miracles and the bellbird’s unpeeling its voice, striking notes as pure as a tuning fork.

And yesterday, driving elsewhere, I turned, without meaning to, into the garden centre. ‘Something flowering,’ I said to the woman with the soiled hands, ‘sell me something that’s flowering.’

And she smiled a kindly smile and I came away with primroses, a pack of six primroses, their crinkled leaves like the skin on a scrotum, their flowers the bugles of spring.