The first warm day of spring is the latest pearl strung on a necklace of days that stretch back to your infancy. What is it about this day that brings those other lost, specifically springy, days back? Why does the newly serious sun disinter its antecedents buried in the earlier years of our lives?
Winter does not revive past winters in the same way. A cold day in June is an isolated, frigid space, an igloo offering no view, and does not draw forth a palette of historical shiver-fests for me. And the summeriness of any given summer day hasn’t the same power to evoke another long-lost summer day lingering in the blubbery archive between my ears. Perhaps there are too many of each – the leaden winter days and the throbbing days of summer. Whereas every year there are only a handful of the Earth-rousing days of early spring.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
Where I grew up, lawnmowing was contagious on those days, an epidemic that swept a neighbourhood. The sound of a Victa gagging on capeweed two fences over incited a twinge of guilt in my father and he must hustle into the shed and haul out his own mower lest he be thought a bad neighbour or slouch. Snakes thawed from their dreams on such days and a kid had to keep an eye on his dog, and a mother on her kids. Lambs drunk on air tottered spindle-legged in ewes’ wake, while I warred endlessly with bees.
The first true spring days are flooded with light and, more powerfully, with scent. Nothing revives the past like its attendant odours – and for spring we have the viridescent musk of fresh-cut grass, jasmine in bloom, camphor on a pair of shorts that have hibernated through winter, and your mother has spread a bag of horseshit on the roses, old Spivey is varnishing his deck, and Mister Malcolm dousing his ironbark gateposts with sump oil.
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Plants are budding, their perfumes nosing forth to woo pollinators. Trees are oozing rich oils as freely as poor uncles do. Any of these smells might pull you from the here-and-now by calling up lost moments, releasing you into a past you didn’t know still existed. Because they carry, as did Proust’s madeleine, “in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection”.
In early spring if you go out walking at a contemplative meander, breathing through your nose and sampling the neighbourhood’s many returned perfumes, you can feel the vivifying sense of reunion with your many past selves receding into childhood like babushka dolls. And then some elated superannuant touring a half-shaven spaniel on a leash will shout at you what a beautiful day it is, thereby smashing your hall of reflection to shards. But that’s spring – ageing strangers are compelled to pass happy judgment on the day. God, I’ve begun to do it myself.
There is one foundational scent beneath all the others, a low note that underpins the whole tune – it is dirt’s yeasty gladness to be alive. Our hemisphere is stretching and yawning, blinking in the yellow light, recalling itself. The soil suddenly reeks of life … the very dirt is waking, its myriad bacteria are blooming beneath our feet and a riot of sweaty microorganisms are breathing in, working out, winking at one another, dining in tiny subterranean bistros, drinking their wine and wooing and rutting in subterranean wormholes - and the scent of their VW (Victory over Winter) celebration is rising into the air and intoxicating us. The dirty dirt, aroused by the touch of the sun, has become a flirtatious fiesta ready to be rooted by grevillea, gum, bougainvillea and plum.
The smells of early spring have been absent a year, and while the absence of a companionable smell often goes unnoticed, its sudden return will be a rejuvenating joy - that first haze of jasmine stops you in your tracks like bumping into an old friend. My grandfather spoke of being miles off the shore of Australia on a ship returning from World War I and getting his first scent of eucalyptus in four years. He would have cried, he said, if that were still possible after Passchendaele.
The scents of spring, though not usually such a definitive fin de siecle as that, offer a similar benediction … life remembered and promised afresh, the game starting anew, and your pervading suspicion that the best has passed is debunked by the breeze and all the proof it carries of life to come.