Yellow

As I pick up my sons from school, something remarkable is taking place in a strip of shrubs planted between a busy road and a building site, where the new school is to be.  The home-time procession of hand-holding humans appears not to notice the wonder just above its heads – signifier of swelling life and the rush of spring.  The fluid, opulent song of a blackbird, purling through the swish of traffic and the voices of children.  For me, that song is an aural hyperlink to elation.  For most others, just another part of the background.

I encouraged my youngest boy to hear this song on his street and notice the jet-black bird with the orange-yellow bill that was producing this lovely sound.  He walked quickly towards the blackbird and turned around to smile at me.  It was a pure smile, not one designed to please.

This morning, frost had greyed the grass.  The rising sun illuminated a fresh knot of daffodils, provoking their yellowness.  They all faced downhill, trembling, an expectant brass section.  A pied woodpecker drummed; woodpigeons woozily re-emphasised their five syllables, growing in volume now that the long winter showed signs of surrender.

I had a to-do list growing by the moment, a mounting feeling of stress, and not long before having to set off for work.  The laptop sat blackly, waiting.  I walked out. 

I paused to enjoy a blackbird singing.  He stopped while I watched him, keeping his bill (as vivid as a sliver of ripe mango) firmly closed, shifting on his perch, waiting for me to go.  We tend to think of a male blackbird’s bill as yellow, but now, in spring, it’s really on the verge of orange, matching the crimped crepe coronas of the daffodils.  As soon as I left his line of sight he started up again, his rich chuckling tones coiling around me like syrup.

My path through the woods is growing in its significance.  I cut it last summer at the cost of many sneezes, ticks and horsefly bites.  It’s now serving me well.  Its winding route causes me to choose my footfall carefully, to step slowly.  Church-like in snow, on these calm sunny mornings the south-facing clearing gathers the sun and a secluded pocket of warmth and light is mine. 

Perhaps the best lesson my path can teach me is to take my time.  Yes, work will still be there.  I will probably not be late.  This path is now.  The green spears of these new bluebell leaves squeak under my boots.  Stop.  At my feet, one bluebell is bursting from a purple casing that prefigures the flower it will become.  Look at the greenish lichen and the purple birch twigs against cirrus.  Note the raindrops caught in the thorns.  Hear the river against the stones, bullfinches piping – and nothing else.

My path ends at the wall, where a fallen stone gives me and the deer an easy crossing into the field.  Pause again to take in the way the remaining frost follows the receding outline of the shadow from the blackthorns.  Take yet another photograph that will underwhelm me later, but which may remind me of what happened next.

All of these pauses add up.  These lacunae are the best of it.  The rushing and chores and the hollow feeling on waking – they’re all chaff.  I know this, yet still I mostly rush from one thing to another.  Each day should be one long pause, on the cusp of the moment when the heavy-headed bird swings across the last of the frost, flashing panels of white in its wing.  In another pause, the sort that form the actual punctuation of my life, the bird remains visible among the thorns just long enough for me to fully realise it.  Then it is gone.

This is one reward for leaving the laptop closed and walking out into a March morning.  A moment when a chunky pinkish bird flies in front of me, pushing a swathe through crowding cares and perches - just long enough.  One with slatted white and black wings like Venetian blinds and a bill that could crush my finger.

Yesterday, it was honeybees on hellebores.  Today, a hawfinch.  Then, as an addendum, the sulphur dot at the bottom of the day’s exclamation mark, the first butterfly of my spring – a brimstone testing its unique hue of green-charged yellow against the primroses as it wavers back and forth. 

On the bank near the school where the blackbird sings, spring has entered its yellow phase: a massed display of daffodils, primroses and celandines, comparing their different shades.  Gold, brass, brimstone and butter.  These yellows speak of sun, of Easter, of the impulses of the emerging insects, of clear skies, fresh breezes and the seeds and succulence to come.  Is there any more innocent, hopeful colour?

Later in the year, when the days reduce again, the park is empty and leaves are severing from the trees, it will be hard to recall the profusely yellow bank and the blackbird’s song.  But I’m going to try.