Sé que la primavera y el verano también tienen sus cosas buenas; pero yo soy más otoñal e invernal, y me da pena cuando terminan estas estaciones. Me gusta la luz de septiembre, la que anuncia que se acortan los días y, aunque pueda parecer que la luz del principio de la primavera es la misma, en realidad no lo es. Mi primer otoño y mi primer invierno sin Princesse desde que la conozco. Hoy la "veía" merodeando por el jardín, y el buen tiempo me acerca al día de agosto en que hará un año que se fue. Un año hizo el 15 de marzo que llegó Blusky, para irse cinco meses después. Ausencias, como lo será mañana el invierno de 2017, no sin que antes me permita copiar aquí una cita de la antología Winter, editada por Melissa Harrison. El mes es febrero, pero es el último texto en la antología; el que anuncia el final del invierno y la llegada de la primavera. Volverá el invierno de 2017, pero sólo durante los últimos días de diciembre. Nos llevará a 2018, pero hasta entonces nos queda una primavera, un verano, y un otoño que ya anhelo. A ver si aprendo a aparcar esta melancolía que me traen los días que se alargan y que me anuncian, como no lo hace el invierno, que otro año se ha pasado.
Every year, in the third week of February, there is a day, or, more usually, a run of days, when one can say for sure that the light is back. Some juncture has been reached, and the light spills into the world from a sun suddenly higher in the sky. Today, a Sunday, is such a day, though the trees are still stark and without leaves; the grasses are dry and winter-beaten.
The sun is still low in the sky, een at noon, hanging over the hills southwest. Its light spills out of the southwest, the same direction as the wind: both sunlight and wind arrive together out of the same airt, and invasion of light and air out of a sky of quickly moving clouds, working together as a swift team. The wind lifts the grasses and moves the thin branches ofthe leafless trees and the sun shines on them, in one movement, so light and air are as one, two aspects of the same entity. The light is razor-like, edging grasses and twigs of the willow and apple trees and birch. The garden is all left-leaning filaments of light, such as you see on cobwebs, mostly, too hard to be called a sparkle, too metallic, but the whole garden's being given a brisk spring-clean. Where ther are leaves, such as the holly 200 yards away, the wind lifts the leaves and the sun sweeps underneath. All moving because of the fresh wind.
Now the town's jackdaws are all up in a crowd, revelling in the wind, chack-chacking at each other. And I hear a girl's voice, one of my daughter's friends, one of hte four girls playing in the garden. She makes a call poised just between play and fear. What are they playing? Hide and seek? No matter. It pleases me that my daughter says they are 'playing in the garden', because they're eleven years old; another year or two and they wouldn't admit to 'playing' at all, and for a while the garden will have no appeal, because everything they want will be elsewhere. For a few years they'll enter a dark mirror-tunnel whose sides reflect only themselves.
The girls themselves can't be seen, obscured by trees and that edgy, breezy light. The year has turned. Filaments and metallic ribbons of wind-blown light, just for an hour, but enough.
Kathleen Jamie, Sightlines, 2012.
