I was away from Dublin for two weeks. When I left, it was the middle of the first part of spring—spring that began in January, when the snowdrops were out, and the whitethorn came into flower. The earliest spring was green and white. And the second part was the yellow of daffodils. By the time I got back from these two weeks away, the jonquils in our front garden (that somehow made it through the landscaping fabric and gravel there) were crispy and going to seed.
Now it is a blue and white part of spring. Forget-me-nots, violets, hyacinths. Amelanchier, crabapple. The sky is blue and white, too, big clouds blowing in from the west, dumping rain, and blowing out to sea.
Of course things have not held still. Nevertheless it's a shock to realize how quickly that last season-in-a-season passed. Here we are already in a new one and I'm trying (my eyes and senses are trying) to keep up.
It seems to me the words for seasons in English should be understood as we understand the front doors to apartment buildings. Everyone knows these aren't the entry to everything; they're a passage to a multiply divided space. Spring, summer, fall, winter: useful openings, but inside there is the gradient from late winter into early spring, the passage from early early spring to the later part of early spring, the full middle of spring, the ending of the middle of spring, the beginning of late spring, the end of spring, the place where spring trails into early summer....
In spring 2020, when I began walking every day, I was living in rural Maine. In that landscape, the first signs of spring take place in March and are subtle and small. I learned to look for and locate these signs of spring over the hours and miles I walked that first year of the pandemic. I took photos as I saw buds grow, shoots appear, and the snow draw back around the bases of trees and at the foot of walls. I realized as I did so that I was learning to tell a new kind of time, one that couldn't be separated from the place I lived and the plants that lived there, too.
This wasn't the first time I'd thought about this: as an immigrant in Flanders, I felt keenly aware of time. I had to learn to keep it, pass it, and tell it myself, because I was outside of or a stranger to many of the systems that would have told it for me—institutions and employers and family and local culture. I think one reason I was able to think about time and seasons at the start of the pandemic was exactly because many years of making and keeping my own time-telling systems as an immigrant had prepared me to do so. What was new to me was the tempo and signs of spring in Maine. The maritime climate of the places I lived in Belgium meant that spring looked like flowers from February onward, but in Maine we got two feet of snow after the equinox in March 2020. I had to learn to look for a long, slow spring that showed up in ways that weren't as easily spotted as plum flowers or tulips.
In that first pandemic spring in Maine, color became for me a way to tell time's passage. If you have lived in a place where the spring's progress is very subtle and prolonged, then you may know that plants move through color phases: pale bronze to pale green-brown to yellow-green to yellow to green to rich green. That's two months in forsythia time. I made clocks to tell spring time, twelve in all: horsetail and snowdrop, hyacinth and lilac, forsythia and grass. Apple blossom. Daffodil. The colors track the color the plant was when it first appeared in a photo until the color it was when I last photographed it, beginning March 15 and ending June 15, 2020. In the New England spring, there were movements of color in the landscape as well as in individual plants: yellow to purple to pink to white to green. (And in other seasons too: lupines to dame's rocket to asters to chicory to goldenrod, blurring the side of the road and the fields beyond into swathes of blue, purple, yellow. Winter's gray-brown-white-blue-flash of red.)
In Dublin’s landscape—so different to anywhere I've lived, though things I learned over years in England and in Belgium help me read the time and season here—I am watching for how seasons appear in this city. That's one reason I take daily photographs, often of 'unimportant' or 'unremarkable' things. I like to see time move, and I can't see that while it does it, for the most part. I see it in reverse, as I look back to September and see red and bronze and green, blackberry and rose and hazelnut. I scan the year in a photos app and see, yes, the colors change across time. That reminds me to look now, now, because everything passes so quickly. Hundreds of seasons in a year.
Time and place are all intertwined in my thinking because moving country or region every few years for the last nearly twenty years (!) has meant learning, over and over, the way time makes itself known through the change of light on architecture and land, the movement of people and animals, the emergence of plants and their dying away. I can't think about color without thinking about migration, or time without thinking about the coltsfoot I saw in Maine, then Iowa, and now keep my eyes open for here. Can't think season without also thinking life, as in, my life. Which I spend, brush in hand, trying to find the color to say dandelion, or late March, or belonging to a place, or spring.
Thank you for reading—and being—here.
...no flowers here on this Maine peninsula yet, though the willow tips by the river are swelling. You may know this but one of the common names for Amelanchier canadensis is Serviceberry and here it meant that when it bloomed the frost was out of the ground and you could bury those who passed and hold a service.