The Return of Unclouded Spring Days

 

The sound of spring has been returning by degrees these past weeks, most perceptibly in the mornings, when the mind, not yet armoured against the day, receives every impression with unusual clarity. 

I wake now to the cries of oystercatchers working the shoreline below the house, their sharp voices travelling through the sea air. 

When I open the window, I can often hear the low hum of fishing boats somewhere out on the water, steady and distant, moving through the harbour mist long before most people are awake. 

It is a sound so long woven into the fabric of these mornings that I think I should feel curiously bereft without it, as one might if an old clock suddenly ceased ticking in a familiar room.

The mornings are still cold enough for sweaters, as G likes to say, and there are days when frost lingers stubbornly on the windscreens near the harbour, as though winter, though diminished, is reluctant to concede defeat entirely. 

Spring in this part of the world advances with reserve. One notices first an alteration in the light, then the smell of wet earth after rain, and afterwards the birdsong seems suddenly fuller, as though the world itself had resumed speaking after a long silent retreat.

There is one hymn in particular that remains with me long after it finishes, “The Unclouded Day.” It’s G’s favourite hymn from Eddy Arnold’s album, Faithfully Yours. I think it is impossible for me now to separate that song from spring mornings altogether.

G has lately been playing Eddy Arnold’s old 1963 album, Faithfully Yours while gardening, and because the windows remain open now, the music drifts through the rooms and outward into the garden together with the scent of damp soil and newly cut grass. 

There is one hymn especially that has attached itself so completely to these spring mornings in this season of pale northern light that I think I shall feel oddly forlorn without it.

“Oh, they tell me of a home far beyond the skies

Oh, they tell me of a home far away

Oh, they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise

Oh, they tell me of an unclouded day.”

There is something deeply consoling in Eddy Arnold’s voice. It has warmth and an unaffected sincerity that has become increasingly rare. Certain songs cease after a while to feel like music at all. They become attached to weather, to rooms, to particular hours of one’s life, until hearing them again is less an act of listening than of remembering. 

I suspect that years from now, if those lines should reach me unexpectedly somewhere, I shall at once think of sea wind, damp earth, and these quiet mornings beside the coast.

The cherry trees in the nearby woodlands have begun flowering now, and when the breeze stirs the branches the petals drift downward through the air with the soft aimlessness of confetti after some modest celebration already half forgotten. The lilacs, too, have opened. 

Their sweetness mingles with the mineral scent of the sea carried inland on the wind. Everywhere there are signs, not merely of growth, but of return.

The earth that lay dormant through winter has softened again beneath the light. Gardens which only weeks ago appeared exhausted now wait patiently for tillage and seed. Nature never hurries restoration. It proceeds according to rhythms too old to concern themselves with urgency.

I think the human spirit obeys much the same law.

There are seasons in life when something inward withdraws entirely from growth. One continues outwardly, answers letters, fulfils obligations, prepares meals, yet inwardly remains still and winterbound. 

I have come to believe there is nothing unnatural in this condition. Fields are not barren merely because they rest beneath frost awhile.

Now, slowly, I feel something within myself beginning to stir again. The sense that the inward ground, long cold and resistant, has begun at last to soften.

The swallows have returned these past weeks with astonishing precision, crossing the evening sky with their forked tails and tireless flight, arriving back at the same places. Watching them, I sometimes wonder whether much of life rests on this instinct towards return.

Towards shelter. Towards companionship. Towards the places where one has once been known and recognised.

Even our oldest stories seem shaped by this longing. In Odyssey, the hero refuses immortality itself for the chance to return home, as though no eternity could compensate the heart for exile from what it truly belongs to.

Perhaps healing itself is only another form of homing instinct.

If the haar remains obediently out at sea, we walk along the coast in the afternoons. Before leaving, I place the vintage Perrier glasses into the refrigerator, a habit inherited from my grandfather, who maintained that cold glasses improved almost everything in warm weather, whether one intended to serve water, lemonade, or beer. 

I remember finding this faintly excessive when I was younger. Age, however, reconciles one to many small domestic observances once dismissed as unnecessary. One begins to understand that what survives longest in family life is rarely grandeur, but attentiveness. 

I now think that attentiveness may itself be one of the purest forms of affection.

When we return from walking, the elderflower lemonade tastes especially sharp and reviving from the chilled glasses, and we sit quietly in the garden with biscuits while the wind moves through the shrubs and carries inland the smell of salt and tidewater. 

There are afternoons now when the world appears arranged with such modest sufficiency that one wonders why mankind labours so tirelessly to complicate existence.

Somewhere in the background, the soft singing of Chet Baker drifts faintly through the open windows, romantic and wistful in that unguarded way only his voice could manage…

There is a painting by Diego Velázquez which has remained with me for many years, The Waterseller of Seville. Of the three known versions, the one housed in the Walters Art Museum has always seemed to me the most affecting, perhaps because of its darker atmosphere and the remarkable chiaroscuro through which light emerges so gently from shadow.

The Waterseller of Seville, Diego Velázquez (ca.1620), Oil on canvas, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. (Image: Wikipedia) 

The painting belongs to the Spanish bodegón tradition, those quiet studies of ordinary life concerned with kitchens, taverns, vessels, bread, water, and the humble objects through which daily existence sustains itself. Velázquez gives us merely an old water seller handing a glass of water to a young boy. The composition is rendered with a grave and almost austere honesty. Earthenware jars, moisture on glass, rough cloth, weathered skin. Nothing extravagant. Nothing idealised. Nothing of bourgeois primness or decorative vanity intrudes on the scene. 

And yet I have always believed the painting concerns itself with far more than water.

An old water seller offering a glass of water to a young boy. Earthenware jars. Moisture gathered on glass. A limited palette. And yet I have always thought the painting speaks about far more than water.

The old man extends the glass towards the boy with such gravity and tenderness that the gesture acquires something almost sacramental. It is not merely refreshment being offered, but some quieter inheritance. 

A way of living passed carefully from one hand to another through acts so ordinary they are scarcely noticed while they occur.

I have always loved the painting for reasons far less scholarly than art historians would approve. It reminds me simply of my grandfather opening the refrigerator and handing me a chilled Perrier glass after long afternoons outdoors. What survives most vividly in memory is seldom grandeur. More often it is some fleeting act of care so ordinary at the time that one scarcely perceives its significance until years afterward.

Modern life encourages a dangerous forgetfulness about such things. We live among machines that compress time, magnify noise, and accelerate labour, yet leave many people strangely impoverished in spirit. One begins mistaking motion for meaning. Yet if all the engines ceased tomorrow, if every frantic mechanism fell silent and rusted quietly into the earth, mankind would still seek the same ancient consolations it has always sought.

Cool water when thirsty. Shade in heat. Shelter from weather. The nearness of another living being. Familiar voices at the close of day.

These things are not luxuries. They are the root of life itself.

Human longing alters very little across centuries.

And so I return, in thought, to my grandfather’s chilled glasses and to Velázquez’s old water seller extending his glass towards the waiting boy. The gesture survives because the need survives. 

Human beings continue, as they always have, to hunger and thirst for remarkably simple mercies. A little shelter from harshness. A little tenderness woven into ordinary hours. 

Some coolness after weariness. Some reassurance that even within this restless and hurried world there remain small acts of care by which life may still be gently sustained.

I adore this jazz album, Syms by Sinatra, released in 1982 by the singer Sylvia Syms, who was also one of Frank Sinatra’s favourite singers. Sinatra himself arranged and produced the album. It is lush and sumptuous, filled with sweeping strings and sophistication, romantic in the truest sense of the word.

My favourite song on the album is You Must Believe in Spring, written by Alan and Marilyn Bergman and Michel Legrand. Syms’s rendition is deeply heartfelt, and one immediately understands why Sinatra admired her so greatly. She gives a masterclass in phrasing. The voice remains smoky and sultry, yet exquisitely controlled. Pitch perfect. Tone pure. She creates magic with every song, shaping each lyric with nuance and emotional intelligence, giving the story texture, atmosphere, and point of view.

What makes her such an extraordinary artist is her intimacy. She understands that great singing is not an exhibition of voice alone, but an act of storytelling to communicate something tender and human from the heart. She possesses the rare ability to inhabit a song completely, and because of that she never paints in only one colour. Her palette is full, subtle, and richly expressive.