Midwinter Cedes to Spring

I’ve marked the turn of the seasons by following a ‘Midwinter’ book with a ‘Spring’ one.

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Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson

My third and favorite Moomins book (so far).

Moomins are supposed to sleep through the winter, but this year young Moomintroll awakens and finds himself in a “strange and dangerous” world transformed by snowdrifts. He can’t get his parents to wake up so is effectively a temporary orphan, surrounded by peculiar creatures from Jansson’s menagerie, this time including a dim-witted squirrel, invisible shrews, a glum little dog who wishes he could run with wolves, and the Dweller Under the Sink (with its exceptionally bushy eyebrows).

While Moomintroll searches for totems of familiarity—

He looked at the cupboard in the corner and thought of how nice it was to know that his own old bath-gown was hanging inside it. That something certain and cosy still remained in the middle of all the new and worrying things.

—Too-ticky has the opposite mindset: “All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured.” She goes fishing under the ice, builds a life-size horse out of snow, and assembles tree trunks and old furniture for the midwinter ritual of a huge bonfire.

When they receive a visit from the Hemulen, who’s keen on skiing and declares the indoors too stuffy in winter, the creatures quickly tire of his energetic optimism. The truth is that they like sitting around being miserable. “I’m cold! I’m lonely! I want the sun back again!” Moomintroll pouts, but even he is too affable to make the Hemulen leave.

Of course the spring finally arrives, as it does every year, but it’s depressingly long in coming and for Moomintroll becomes a matter of faith. I love the strangeness of Jansson’s imagination, the balance of melancholy and comedy, and the little philosophical nuggets buried along the way – children and adult readers alike will get a lot out of this. It doesn’t talk down to children with a rosy message about everything being alright.

My rating:

 

Spring: An anthology for the changing seasons, edited by Melissa Harrison

Although this was the first of the Wildlife Trusts anthologies published in 2016, I got a late start last year so am reading this as the final of four. In common with the other volumes, it’s a terrific mix of contemporary and historical writing, big names and newcomers, observation and reflection. Compared with the other books, it seems to have more about WT sites in particular, with a few pieces from current volunteers or former employees. I also noticed that there’s a bit more of a focus on birds – with essays on the chiffchaff, the birds encountered on the Cley Marshes, cuckoo festivals, young dippers, and a tawny owl chick.

That said, there’s still plenty of variety here, with everything from spring flora* to adders fueling the generally two- to three-page essays. I especially liked Kate Long’s piece on filming hedgehogs at night and Vijay Medtia’s on how people of color living in cities have little access to nature; he recalls spotting a magpie with a twig in its beak at a train station and having to ask someone what it was called. Of the previously published authors, I enjoyed hearing more from Rob Cowen and Miriam Darlington and laughed at Will Cohu’s ice cream and underwear metaphors applied to varieties of cherry trees.

You can’t beat George Orwell on toad sex, and it’s fun to encounter excerpts from classic novels in the context of a nature book: The Wind in the Willows, Lorna Doone, and Jane Eyre (which, shamefully, I didn’t recognize until Lowood was mentioned in the last paragraph). I think my favorite piece of all, though, was Jo Sinclair’s about watching spring’s arrival after a major operation and noting nature’s inscrutable jumble of beauty and brutality.

And my favorite passage:

Year after year all this loveliness for eye and ear recurs: in early days, in youth, it was anticipated with confidence; in later years, as the season approaches, experience and age qualify the confidence with apprehension lest clouds of war or civil strife, or some emergency of work, or declining health, or some other form of human ill may destroy the pleasure or even the sight of it: and when once again it has been enjoyed we have a sense of gratitude greater than in the days of confident and thoughtless youth. Perhaps the memory of those days, having become part of our being, helps us in later life to enjoy each passing season.

(from Sir Edward Grey’s The Charm of Birds, 1927)

This passage from Reverend Francis Kilvert’s diary (April 14, 1871) makes me look forward to our trip to nearby Hay-on-Wye next month: “The village is in a blaze of fruit blossom. Clyro is at its loveliest. What more can be said?” Simply that these anthologies are an essential companion to the seasons.

*Like my husband’s piece, positioned right before the R.D. Blackmore extract.

(See also my reviews of Summer, Autumn and Winter.)

My rating: