#health-and-illness — Public Fediverse posts

In 2017 I wrote this, for a so-far unpublished project:

You never quite know when it’s going to happen, but just a couple of bright warm days at this time of year are enough to set off spring’s slow-motion explosion. You’ll notice it from your car, eventually – the flash of newly emerged, fresh green hawthorn leaves on the motorway verge, the froth of white blackthorn blossom in a hedge – but to really get to know the seasons as they turn, you have to be on foot.

There are few things more satisfying, I think, than really knowing an area of land. It doesn’t have to be in the countryside, by any means – cities and towns provide an amazing variety of native and non-native plants and biodiversity. But to walk an area of ground, daily or nearly-daily, is the only way to really know it – its moods, its patterns, and its day-by-day changes.

It’s at ground level that you really feel the seasons turning. The first smell of the soil, awakened from its winter sleep. The daffodils are here in great joyful clumps, but at their feet the bluebell leaves are already starting to push through into the light. The first real leaf-break may not have come to our relatively high moorland, but the wild honeysuckle has taken its chances and opened its first buds. The little yellow pom-poms of dandelion flowers are popping up again all over the banks, much to the joy of the bumblebees who are starting to emerge, hungry, from their winter hibernation. And the blackthorn is flowering in earnest.

The first of the hedgerow blossoms, you’ll recognise it for the exuberant froth of tiny white flowers against a dark, naked framework of twiggy branches armed viciously with inch-long, sharp thorns. Remember where you see this – once the blossom fades and the small dark green, oval leaves emerge, it becomes a rather unremarkable part of the hedgerow landscape. Blackthorn is exuberant in flower but shy in fruit.

But where there were flowers, it’s likely that, come the autumn, you may find a wonderful cache of small, sour, dark purple sloes nestling between the vicious thorns and the rosettes of protective leaves, always assuming pollination has been kind, the late frosts gentle, and no other bird or human forager has beaten you to your treasure! A year without sloes is a year without sloe gin, and a year without sloe gin is a sad year indeed. 

Yesterday, as I looked along one of our local hedges, the words came back to me – the same changes, in the familiar places. The first green shoots of honeysuckle amongst the mostly bare branches of the hedge. A flash of frothy white blackthorn blossom on the roadside verge as I drove into town. In the garden the buds of the sweet currant bush are blushing pink but not yet open, and the camellia (a horrible grafted thing we inherited with the cottage and which flowers half a decent dark pink and half a strange raspberry-ripple colour) has started to open its blooms. The first few daffodils popped open two weeks ago but more and more of the clumps that appear each year from the lawn and – well, wherever they like honestly – have begun their cheerful display. The yellow-soft catkins of the hazel have opened up next to the driveway, dancing lightly in the breeze, and if you look closely on the branches you can see the tiny pink female flowers that will ripen into nuts in the autumn.

This will be our tenth summer here and the familiarity of nature’s patterns, their rhythms and their harmonies, marks out the turning of the year. The way that the early yellow-and-white spring of snowdrops and primroses, daffodils and celandines, of pennywort and gorse and wild garlic and blackthorn, gives way all of a sudden in late April or early May to pink-and-purple spring as bluebells and campion, violets and early purple orchids riot on the banks and verges, among the unfurling fronds of bracken. And then almost as suddenly, it will be summer, and the tall grasses will dominate, peppered here and there with the red spikes of dock and sorrel flowers, all rippling in the breeze like the surface of a lake, and all the trees will shift from their acid-fresh new leaf green into the saturated tones of maturity. 

So much changes, every year, and so little. As I wrote the fragment that opens this essay I was trying to write myself back to life, somehow. My Dad had died of cancer less than two months earlier, his funeral – a small bunch of snowdrops placed on the coffin –  barely weeks before. Reading it now I can feel myself willing new life back into the world. But I note the date on it, too – mid-March. As it happens, the day of my birthday. I’m seeing these changes fully half a month earlier this year, at the end of a winter so wet that just now I despair of there ever being an end to the mud. A mild winter which has brought more frequent and more powerful Atlantic storms than we have seen here in the past.

The light is, palpably, returning. But today has been so grey that it has barely felt like daylight, and brought with it practically another inch of rain that no one wants or needs. Coming to the end of my (first?) year lost to Covid it’s hard to feel the excitement of the new season like I used to. I know that in years gone by I would already have started my tomatoes and chillies in modules on the window ledge but the effort for now seems beyond me. Much as I feel I must not lose this year like I lost the last there is only so much energy, so much capacity, so much force that I can bring to bear on the world and compared to years gone by it feels so little, a feeble attempt and unlikely to make even the lightest scratch on the surface of this next year as it, too, passes me by. 

The quote in the title is from Seneca’s Hercules:

“Few are familiar with untroubled peace. They, conscious of fleeting time, hold fast the moments that will never return. While fate allows, live gladly! Life hurries apace, and with each winged day the wheel of the headlong year turns forward.”

https://www.loebclassics.com/view/seneca_younger-hercules/2002/pb_LCL062.63.xml

This blog is an act of faith in the future, I suppose. A promise to myself that the seasons will continue to turn and that I will be here to see them, to note them, to appreciate them in their rambunctious glory even if being able to fulfil my desire to cultivate and curate them is, at least for now, to a great extent beyond my reach. 

Thank you to all of you who have taken the time to read, and comment, on what I’ve written over the last month – and especially to those of you who have felt able to support the work I’m doing here by contributing to my Ko-fi – and I really hope you will want to stay with me for the long run. After all, there’s that sloe gin to look forward to!

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https://loreandordure.com/2024/02/27/the-wheel-of-the-headlong-year-turns-forward/

#flowers #gardening #healthAndIllness #nature #seasons #spring

And look what arrived in the mail! After 5 years of planning & development, it's great to have a copy in my hands. Come along to the launch at #TASA2022. #TASA #sociology #healthandillness #medicalsociology #textbook #highereducation

To introduce myself - I'm a sociologist in Australia focused on #ageing #ageism #elderabuse #agefriendly societies, #TBI (traumatic brain injury), #ableism in #highereducation, #MedicalScience, #healthandillness, and the #body. And of course, I teach too, including #sociology of #gender #sexualities. Very happy to connect with likeminded people. @[email protected] @academicsunite @sociologists_list @[email protected]

To introduce myself - I'm a sociologist in Australia focused on #ageing #ageism #elderabuse #agefriendly societies, #TBI (traumatic brain injury), #ableism in #highereducation, #MedicalScience, #healthandillness, and the #body. And of course, I teach too, including #sociology of #gender #sexualities. Very happy to connect with likeminded people. @[email protected] @academicsunite @sociologists_list @[email protected]