Mizzle is the Cornish name for the fine, fine precipitation that craftily sinks through your clothes and gets your skin wet even though it does not appear to be raining. Today the weather is mizzling, milder, softer, stealthy. Spring is whispering closer, though I drove to work down some old lanes that took me back in time; hundreds of years of hedges and fields, of seasons turning; here no flowers had yet even come to bud- it was poised in winter- it was like being shown someone else’s memory, like history was layered- like the mist. You could reach out a hand, feel it soak into your bones. It was peaceful. A reprieve. So when I reached the next village and the verges sang with flowers, I sang out with them- the song of seasonal lineage, the song of Winter-Spring.
It hasn’t rained every minute of the day, only most of them. At lunch, I walked back from the shops again (went to try on leopard print shoes but they pinched, came back with a lamp that didn’t work, returned it; bought two candles instead, and a consolation avocado) with my grey striped hair loosely tousled, in my black faux fur, looking like some kind of damp forest beast. Before the rain I listened to birds sing, trill, caw and call- the sound of gulls involuntarily invoking winter sea dips- I could feel the waves swoosh at my calves, the soft salinity, the foam-fuzz. In the rain, I listened. The percussion of it, the white noise of it, the way it wraps you in your space. I was a soggy happy beast hugging an avocado, dreaming of swimming and candlelight. Later I will drive home, it will be dark. Whatever the weather, the car’s headlights will scan over green verges and the spring flowers will glow. Everytime they elicit awe- real, edge-of-the-phys...