Life lately: the first green things and a feeling like relief

There are two or three days every March when you step outside and something in the air is different. Not warm — it's still cold, properly cold, the kind that bites at your ears and requires a scarf. But underneath the cold there's something. A living quality that wasn't there a week ago. Something that has to do with soil thawing and bulbs shifting and the whole quiet machinery of the natural world reasserting itself after months of stillness. I smelled it on Wednesday morning and I stopped on the pavement outside my building with my keys still in my hand and just stood there for a moment, head slightly raised, trying to place it.

Winter is ending. That's what the smell was.

I want to remember every year that this moment exists, and that it arrives before you think it will. Before the blossom, before the clocks changing, before the weather app promises anything — the air knows first. And then the ground does. And then the green things begin.

The first sign: something green that wasn't there last week

There's a narrow strip of garden beside the path I take to the shops — it belongs to the ground floor flat there, the one with the blue front door — and on Wednesday morning there were small green points pushing up through the dirt. Snowdrops, or something like them. Not open yet. Just present. Just beginning the process of arriving.

I almost missed them. My head was down against the cold and I was thinking about something else entirely. But I glanced sideways at exactly the right moment and there they were — the first green things — and something in my chest did a small, involuntary lurch of recognition and relief. Not dramatic. Just the quiet version of joy that arrives when something you forgot to wait for turns up anyway. I stood there on the cold pavement and looked at them for longer than was probably necessary, feeling oddly grateful.

March is like that. It tends to arrive ahead of your expectations of it. You're still braced for winter and the green things have already started, quietly getting on with it.

The window opened for the first time in months

On Thursday afternoon I opened my kitchen window. It was the first time since November — I know this without having to check because I remember closing it in November, the specific afternoon when the cold became too insistent and I locked the flat into its winter configuration. Five months of sealed windows, of the indoor air being recycled and slightly stale, of the outside world being something you observed rather than something that could reach you.

When the window opened, the air came in cold and alive. There was that underneath-smell again — the soil-thaw quality — and something lighter that was possibly from the tree in the courtyard below, which is beginning to do something tentative with its branches. My curtain lifted in the breeze and for a moment the flat felt like a different place. Bigger. More connected to something.

I stood at the window for longer than I needed to. I had the rest of the afternoon's work to do and I stood at the window instead, face tilted slightly into the breeze, mug warming both hands, just receiving it. I didn't feel guilty about this. It felt like exactly the right thing to be doing.

The herbs I bought on impulse at the market

On Saturday I went to the small market that runs in the square near here on weekend mornings. I had a list: bread, something for dinner, the specific kind of oats I like. I came home with all of those things and also a small pot of basil and a small pot of thyme, because they were sitting on a table near the exit looking extremely hopeful and I couldn't resist them.

The disproportionate joy of this purchase is something I want to document. They're on the kitchen windowsill now — the one I opened on Thursday — and they get the light that comes in from the courtyard in the late morning and I have looked at them approximately forty times since Saturday. They are very small. They smell excellent. Something about having something alive and growing on the sill of the window that can now be opened again feels like a small declaration: the room is reconnecting with the outside world. The outside world is reconnecting with life. We're all in this together.

I've been pinching the thyme leaves and smelling my fingers, which I know is a very small pleasure to be writing about publicly. But I'm writing about it because these are the kinds of sensory details that make ordinary life feel inhabited and particular rather than generic. The smell of fresh thyme on a March morning is a very specific experience. It makes me feel present in my body in a way that screens and tasks do not. I want to keep noting this, because it's easy to stop noticing it and I don't want to stop noticing it.

I've tried to grow herbs before with mixed results — the basil especially has a habit of dying dramatically about three weeks in. But there's something about buying plants in early March that is more about the act of optimism than about the outcome. You're participating in the season. You're putting something growing on your windowsill and saying: yes. I'm here too. Let's see what happens.

Standing at the open window with the curtain lifting

Let me stay in this scene for a minute because I want to record it properly while I still can. Thursday afternoon, the window open for the first time in months. The light coming through the courtyard at around half past three — not warm yet, not the good spring light, but no longer the flat grey of deep winter either. A slight directionality to it. The curtain — the sheer linen one that I've had for years and is almost see-through now from washing — lifting in the breeze and then falling back.

The mug in my hands was the large one with the tiny chip in the handle that I've been drinking from for so long I don't remember acquiring it. The tea was the one I make when I want warmth rather than caffeine — a blend with rose hip in it that smells faintly sweet. I had been trying to write something before I gave up and went to stand at the window, so there was a half-finished notebook page on the table behind me.

The relief in that moment was specific and physical. Not the relief of something resolved — the winter wasn't over, nothing dramatic had changed. But the relief of something loosening. Of the season beginning to release its grip. Of the particular emotional weight that accumulates over months of closed windows and low light starting, very slowly, to lift. The life lately photo dump of my inner life in that moment: relief. Gratitude. Gentleness toward the winter that was hard and toward myself for getting through it.

Spring arrives in the air before it arrives in the calendar, in the temperature, in anything visible. Pay attention to the air first — it always knows.

What spring does to my energy — and how I'm meeting it differently this year

Spring has historically done something both wonderful and slightly destabilising to my energy. The extra light comes and I want to do everything simultaneously. The list of things I've been waiting until spring to begin suddenly all activates at once and I end up overwhelmed by possibility rather than energised by it. I've overloaded several Marches this way. Turned the season into a project list rather than just living in it for a while first.

This year I'm trying something different. I'm leaning into the energy — yes, the walks, the open windows, the herbs on the sill — without immediately converting it into productivity. The aliveness of early March is its own thing. I don't need to justify experiencing it by making it useful. I can just stand at the window with the curtain lifting and let spring arrive at its own pace, noting it with the same care I'd give any other thing worth keeping.

A few months ago when I started this diary, I was in the thick of the nervous new-creator phase — posting carefully, second-guessing everything, learning to show up anyway. There was something about winter that suited that phase. The inwardness of it. The quiet processing. Now something in me is ready to take up slightly more space, to walk farther, to open more windows. That feels right. That feels like the natural arc of things.

The first green things are up. The air smells like something starting. I'm here for all of it.