I see blossom in January – and feel a sickening swell of solastalgia
There is a particular queasy disquiet that comes from looking at blossom in January. Or daffodils just weeks after Christmas. At seeing catkins dangling from trees that are still bathed in dark from about 4.30pm. It is an uncanny sense that something here isn’t right. I get it, too, in August, when the blackberries have already ripened into dust, before the new school term starts. Or when I hear birdsong under a yellow streetlamp.
Perhaps this is just the outdoors equivalent of moaning about Easter eggs being in the shops in January. As in, it happens every year but we are somehow shocked anew each time. Maybe daffodils have always pushed up their spears as students fill in their Ucas applications. Maybe there have always been blackberries in July. Maybe it’s just my memory playing tricks on me.
But I do feel it. During a walk through a nature reserve this week I felt something like dread, licked by something like hope, as I saw pink blossom on a bone-grey tree. I was recently introduced to the term “solastalgia”, an Australian word that sits somewhere between homesickness, sadness at environmental destruction and a sense of impotence in the face of change. Despite being an urban resident, who learns about 97% of what she knows about the land from listening to The Archers, I am still not completely out of touch with my natural environment.
I don’t know if there is a word for the feeling of confusion when our bodies respond subconsciously to changes in weather, season, climate that we – as bus-riding, packet-eating, fluorescently lit urbanites – don’t consciously notice. If there is a word for that discord that makes us horny in March despite not seeing any signs of spring, or grief-stricken in autumn even though we ignore the trees, then I don’t know it. But I feel it. Right down to my roots.
Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood