It started with Jon Batiste, specifically his song “Ode to Joyful”. A take on Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”, the track is both homage and newness, an odyssey through classical and jazz and blues and gospel. A brightness. I’d been writing about February for all of February, and into March. The pall and the hurt of it. How it’s a deception, a growing pain, how the head of spring was unable to bloom fast enough. But then I listened to “Ode to Joyful” as the weak March sun filtered into the dining room and realised. February was a thick fug I was moving out of. No longer relevant. I don’t want to hold it in the present when it’s trying to pass.
I want odes to joyful, instead:
1.
It’s become a new pleasure, watching scallions being julienned just for prettiness and sprinkled over noodles, or thick slices of bread pressed into a hot pan by knowing fingertips. There’s joy in the tiny ecru bowl that holds the soy sauce; there’s thrill in the smile that fans out across the TV host’s face as he bites into a sweet tart and inhales a medley of pastry and custard. K and I watch these things on a projector, all of it alive across our living room wall. Perhaps this is why these programmes make us want to eat; magnified moving images become palpable in our space. But I think it’s more likely our love of food. We press pause and skim through the cupboards, see if we can rustle something up. Sometimes we return to the sofa with something relevant to our new cravings—steamed mushroom buns, seared peach slices, a Hong Kong egg sandwich. Other times we make a note and, a few days later, our own version of whatever danced across our wall that night.
2.
About that weak March sun: it’s watery, but that’s how I like it. It isn’t strong enough to stifle the clouds, to seal everything in place. Instead, it catches in the wind, flickers between brilliant and soft like a temperamental dimmer light. Bright enough sometimes to make me pull my cap down, but it doesn’t penetrate my clothing, can’t induce a prickle under my armpits. It’s gentle, none of the abrasion and glare of summer. There’s the novelty too, of rays through the windows, of a thin buttermilk glow from nine until four some days, of simply the real true possibility of sunshine.
3.
My new badminton shoes, the brightest white, feel like a promise. They’re padded inside and grippy on the soles to empower my beginner’s mistakes. I bought them because I’ve found a piece of myself on the reflective sports court that I want to embrace. Since the new year began, I’ve been here and in the dance studio and at the gym, and I’m starting to see how the combination of all of it is helping my game. I’m not afraid to fall in dance, and that’s become true here, too: deeper lunges to receive the short shots, weight on the wrong foot but still breaking into a sprint as the shuttlecock flies over my head. I’ve started bouncing lightly on my toes for the whole hour in readiness and belief. I’ve started shrugging off the doubt and reaching my arms out long.
4.
On a pale blue afternoon, K said: I think the gulls are coming back.
He saw the first wisps of a nest on the low flat roof of the house extension opposite. That’s where it happened before. Last spring, through the kitchen window, we watched three baby gulls grow. Speckled and tawny, beaks open in puddles and tufty bodies nestled under the eave. Whenever their mother returned, they would burst into an urgent chorus of yaps. As they got bigger, they began unfurling their wings and rising for a second, front of feet skimming the roof felt. But it still seemed far away, the prospect of them leaving. A few weeks later, they began to scale the roof above, feet sliding against slate and wings flapping. Eventually, they each made it up there. Stood on the wide chimney at the top and gazed out at the near future. We knew it was coming, then. They left one by one. I looked out one morning and they were all gone, including the mother. For a while afterwards, mixed emotions. A giddy kind of gratitude that we got to witness it. A small sadness whenever I glanced out the window. Relief and reassurance, about life and nature and knowing.
It must be time again, K said.
Now we watch and wait.
5.
I’ve been baking and it feels like the opening of spring. To rifle through the back of the cupboard and pull out the muffin tray, to rinse the cake tin and slide scissors through the glimmer of baking parchment. I buy new ingredients specifically for the vegan recipes I’ve bookmarked. Spring is a fresh decisiveness that dissolves the addle of winter as though it was never here. Biscotti, French chocolate cake, egg tarts. The kitchen smells of warm vanilla, fan oven sweeping me into a dream. The things I bake become small pleasures, for when I’m tuning out of the day, or after dinner at the coffee table, kneeling on the rug. They taste bright and personal, maybe a tribute to this new season.
