The Absence of Spring
It’s late April. Have you heard a cuckoo yet? All the conditions are right, the signs are here but it is nearly May and their arrival is late.
The first call usually comes from the south-east; standing in the garden, or in the kitchen with the big window open, their rounded vowels lollop over the fields, bound languorously over the hedge lines and slalom between the trees to reach an ear that didn’t even know it was listening. It is a moment’s awakening. It is an easy sound to listen to, soft on the ear and effortless in the making it seems, as though the air is simply let out between the beak like an old man’s harrumph. Mellifluous; that’s a word that would adequately describe the cuckoo’s call, and it comes with the warmth and richness of the spring season that honey also provides. Slow, unctuous, soothing, reassuring.
It’s nearly May. Where are the cuckoos?
Milkmaids spread year on year in the meadow just beyond the garden. A tiny sparse patch is now a broad sprinkling of the palest pink held on tall stems above the grasses that have begun their own spring surge. Another name for them is cuckoo flower, because they arrive together, heralding spring. The bluebells, windflowers and primroses have taken over from where the snowdrops and daffodils were; the early purple orchids, Solomon’s seal, ground ivy, white deadnettle, stitchwort and celandines, violets and speedwell are all taking their cue. The list goes on and I can tick off each as I spy them, self-satisfied, like a collector in love with the act of accumulation. The chiff chaff has been here for weeks. Pairs of blackbirds, dunnocks and wood pigeons are all nesting in an overgrown flowerbed outside my back door, there are swallows and house martins on the wing. I even spotted a lone sea eagle, asserting its rights for airspace against four buzzards dwarfed but not diminished, by this strange visitor. But I long for the cuckoo.
A sunny day; a rare warm day with a bright blue sky in this late, slow spring, and I can’t get out. The next day is dull but mellow still; I don’t need my hat when I take the dog out. With purpose I head south-east. I walk and I listen. I walk towards the hope of a cuckoo. The dog dashes around the woodland, I hear her splashing into the ponds and then shaking herself off as she gets out. She covers the ground so fast, disappearing off in one direction then reappearing impossibly from another. She is energised, fully alive and as she bounces on springs along the path edge, she makes me smile. And a cuckoo calls, from off in the distance, from where I always first hear him and I am relieved and realigned. Spring seems possible now; a tenuous state held in the softest of sounds.
