March 31, 2014

The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower

Over and over again lately, the first line (which is also the title) of Dylan Thomas’s poem has been running through my mind: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower…” though not the rest of the poem, obviously. When spring finally arrives, one is allowed not to think things totally through to their logical conclusions. Though I sort of do, feeling a slight dread at the green creeping up through the soil–because first it’s crocuses and then forsythia, and irises (!), then full summer green, then the summer green that all gets to be a bit too much as weeds appear through the cracks in the pavement, and then and then and then. See, the crocuses aren’t even properly here, and I’m killing them already. The force, indeed. Isn’t it curious how winter always seems eternal while summer is a moment in time? Though apart from its joys, winter is mainly trudging about in heavy boots, the force itself remaining dormant.

But no, let’s start again. The force has driven the green fuse up from the ground. It is spring! It is spring! And while last spring felt full of the force, as we waited for our baby to arrive, it’s got nothing on this spring. Speaking of force. Speaking of Irises. I set her on the ground and she charges: go! go! go! And: grow! grow! grow! As if the rhyming words were interchangeable, which, if one is a 10-month-old baby, they sort of are. So she goes, driven. To crawl, to stand, to climb. After a tumble from the second step, our baby gates went up Saturday night. How can this be happening already? My incredulity partly because a second child’s first year goes by in the span of a few weeks, but also because, with Harriet, the gates were never entirely necessary. She was one of those babies of whom parents say, “I think she’s going to skip crawling,” in order to excuse the baby’s sluggishness. She had a force of course, oh yes she did, but it wasn’t physical propulsion. Whereas Iris is a blur.

Tomorrow is April. On Saturday, I went out and got my hair cut after nearly a year, and got my eyebrows waxed, and then went to Futures Bakery and drank a chai latte BY MYSELF whilst reading Jane Gardam’s Last Friends, which was so so wonderful, and so was the moment. There was no force. I’ve never been so much in the now, and it was such a commemoration of that day exactly a year ago when I took myself out for lunch just one last time, knowing that would be ages before I could afford such luxury of time and aloneness again. But we’re here! We made it. The journey so much smoother than I’d ever dared to suppose.

But it’s not the end, of course, oh no. The force keeps forcing onward, going and growing. The former the given and the latter the point.