In praise of the seasonal

Spring is, in the end, the hardest of the seasons. In spring we encounter inevitable loss, and mourn what will never return. A grand reward for having outlived winter. So of all the seasons, spring is the moment to cherish what has returned, even if the only certainty is that it is here for now.

I was passing through our kitchen on my way from the dining room to the hall and it stopped me in my tracks. The smell of it reaching into me wordlessly as smells do best. There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt: it was asparagus season again.

Yes, it’s possible to buy asparagus all year round. But why would I do that? Why would I buy something from the other side of the world when that same something is grown on my doorstep? And as we say, absence makes the heart grow fonder. And I have learned to wait.

So our asparagus never travels half way around the world. It’s grown less than an hour from our home, and—by those traditional miracles, friendship and acquaintance—finds its way to our kitchen without one single additional kilometer being driven, sailed, or flown.

And we dust off the asparagus pan, which is briefly promoted to the front of the cupboard, and for a few short weeks eat asparagus as much as—sometimes more than—is humanly possible, in a festival of pasta, risotto, pizza, bechamel, parmesan, butter, vinaigrette… And then, as suddenly as it arrived it is gone. The pan is washed for a last time and relegated to the back of the cupboard once more. And the kitchen momentarily seems slightly empty.

I don’t miss asparagus for the 40 or so weeks of the year that it isn’t here. Don’t we only miss those things that are meant to be here but are not? But I’m always glad to see it, and smell it, return.

... the final half mile of the 5,600-mile high wire that nature has stretched taut for them...

Not all seasonal pleasures originate, as asparagus does, on our doorsteps. Perhaps the best among them really do travel half way around the world.

And so, one asparagus evening, I’m stopped in my tracks once again. But not by a smell. By screams.

They arrive in the early evening, without safety net or safety harness, despite the fact that a fall to earth means certain death. Negotiating the final half mile of the 5,600-mile high wire that nature has stretched taut for them, one end fixed in Cape Town, South Africa, the other to our home.

Common Swifts. But common in name only. Back, back they come to the place of their birth. And my heart rises up as though to meet them. And I run out to get a better view, forgetting to breath.

... wriggling across the pristine blue stucco ceiling of summer...

Are they, too, glad? Glad to see again, after a seven-month absence, the jumble of unnecessary embellishment that we call home? The huge, steeply sloping roof, made to fend off snows they will thankfully never see; the long, sober balcony that extends out so perfectly that it allows the rooms beneath it warmth in the winter but casts them in shade in the summer when the sun is higher in the sky; the massive stone foundation stones blasted from the local quarry, in which the swifts' distant cousins the Crag Martins still nest; the fine woodwork, with its modest motifs of subtle sunbursts; the exquisitely positioned whole?

"Embellishments" because each swift only has eyes for one thing, one elongated hole roughly 30 by 65 millimeters between tile and eaves—the gateway to the cavity in which they first came into the world, and in which, this year, some will raise another generation of truly remarkable birds.

For the next four months they will be our almost constant companions, wriggling across the pristine blue stucco ceiling of summer. Each day, we will wake to their morning screams. And we will sit out late, fretting sometimes, and count each adult back into its nest as night falls. The young ones, not yet ready to raise a family, piercing the garden’s green with shriek and wing; the older ones discreet and business-like, their arrival announced by the sound of their wings cutting through the air like a sword stroke, passing through that one, elongated hole, that unique gateway, in exactly the same way that toothpaste doesn’t go back into the tube, or that a champagne cork leaves its bottle, only in reverse.

... the almost overwhelming feeling of recognizing an old, long-lost friend...

And then, one morning, they will be gone. And the sky will suddenly be empty. And we miss them. But only for a short while. Because one can only miss what really is meant to be here. And now these birds need different climes.

There is an almost overwhelming feeling that overcomes one when, across a room crowded with strangers, one recognizes an old, long-lost friend, and remembers how well one felt the last time they were around.

And Common Swifts lend me that feeling for a few months each year. Which is why as long as I am here, there will always be a welcome for them at this, the very northern end of nature’s long high wire.

[Image: pau.artigas, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, with thanks to Wikipedia.]