Michael Harding: Winter releases its clutch and the blur falls away

This week we offer inspiration to put a spring in your step in time for that extra hour of daylight on Sunday 29th

On the first day of February I started looking forward to spring. I sat at the window watching for the lengthening of each day. I sweated poisons in the sauna and renounced the blur of alcohol that had sustained me through winter. The blur of dreamy shadows that thickens with each glass of whiskey and fills my winters with exotic phantoms; like the Chinese dentist who appeared to me in December to say that I should use a harder toothbrush, or the woman who approached me on a cold January day and said she broke her wrist in Vietnam and that the only thing that helped her was Tiger Balm. Winter is so dark that I’m never quite sure if such visitations are real or just hallucinations.

But now I have thrown off my wool vests. The urge to cling to the fire is dwindling. The mornings don’t grip me like the hand of someone already dead. And the streets of Drumshanbo are not so lonesome now that the snow is gone.

Spring wakens me early in the morning, as the dawn drags songs from the throats of little birds. And though the trees are still bare they move differently. They are supple in the wind as the sap rises. I can feel it. And I realize that I have survived another night, as old men used to whisper years ago, when I was a night porter in a Cavan hospital.

Father’s ghost

Even my father’s ghost looks in the window less frequently now. During winter he was always there on the other side of the glass, standing gaunt in the other world with books by Primo Levi under his arm, inviting me to join him, as he waited under the trees, with the severity of Samuel Beckett.

My father’s life was a long winter, and a late spring. It wasn’t an easy journey from the cottage in Donnybrook, where he was reared in poverty, to the swanky semi-detached house in Cavan where he ended up in the shelter of his beloved.

The grandmother who reared him had vanished without a trace by the time I was born and I found her again only because the receipt for her burial in a Dublin cemetery fell out of my father’s suitcase when I was clearing out the house after my mother’s death.

An elderly sexton carried a dusty ledger under his arm as I followed him through the burial grounds to her grave; a hillock as dainty as baked bread, a lump under the skin of soil.

I felt alive as I stood over her bones, because I am a bone of her bone. And I felt as if I was standing at my own grave too. Where I will be disposed of when the soul in me has travelled on to restructure itself somewhere else in the universe. That is what spring is for me; the coming again of things; the restructuring of the soul.

Two years ago I bought roses in a garden centre. They were just twigs with bare roots. I left them in the shed through the winter and they perished. The frost cut into the wood, and even as I planted them I knew they were finished. They pushed out a few yellow shoots, but then turned black.

“All my lovely little bushes are dying,” I thought.

And the bay tree a poet gave me died. It came from the garden he tended with his wife, and when they parted the bay tree was the only thing he wanted to keep. But then one day he handed it to me.

So I planted it by the front door and it flourished. After six years it blocked the window light and so I asked a builder to shift it with his digger. That’s how it died; lying lopsided in the corner of the garden, though I couldn’t bear to tell the poet.

Love restructured

It’s as simple as this; in winter everything seems to die, to fall into a catastrophe of silence. And then a certain day arrives, more gentle and lively than all the rest, just after the equinox, and everything springs to life again as love is restructured in the world.

One day last week I passed the dead rose bushes and saw 100 buds nudging themselves into the air and I went to the corner where the bay tree had been abandoned and it too had already put out small leaves that soon I will clip and dry and use to flavour all my summer soups.