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February 08, 2006
Spring
I might have mentioned before that January and I do not get along very well. I wouldn’t say I had SAD because I’m OK during November and December with the Winter Solstice, Christmas and New Year to focus on. January however seems to drag, the weather is always damp cold and uninspiring and Spring always seem a good couple of months away. I’m afraid I don’t care what my new 2006 calendar says, January lasts well into February, in fact January lasts until the first hint of Spring, however subtle that hint may be.
So there I was this morning studying away when I heard a sound, like the voice of an old friend returning. No it wasn’t the dawn chorus, the first sign of Spring does not necessarily have anything to do with nature, the sound I’m referring to was the din of a radio, some one else’s radio.
But there was something about that sound that put a smile on my face and a tap in my foot, not that I liked the tune (it was Coldplay in case you wondered) but because the fact that I could hear it meant that the weather had improved so slightly that someone had their window open. I’m not a social animal, I like my own company but every now and then I desire to be reminded that other people exist, without having to converse with them. That’s what unnerves me about winter, that we leave the house only when we have to, and then we go about our chores at a certain speed and with our heads down, just to get it over with. In Spring we stroll and we linger, often catching a stranger’s eye and allowing a smile or a nod to pass our lips. Even when we are at home we hear a muffled tune, or perhaps a burst of laughter and we know that another soul is only a couple of walls away.
So I stood and stretched at the window, trying to decipher where the noise was coming from and just at that moment the sun appeared from behind a cloud and illuminated the window box on the balcony. (That window box that I stopped watering as soon as the weather turned cold, in fact I don’t think we have so much as opened the back door since October). Anyway there amongst all the long forgotten, barren sprigs of whatever, stood a solitary sunflower, a diddy sunflower standing at only about ten centimetres tall but a sunflower all the same.
At last, it seems that January has left us.
Posted by purple elephant at February 8, 2006 11:25 PM