Love List: March

temporal allegiance | the human heart | the unmade cup of tea

Read Chasing Fog // Order a signed copy of Chasing Fog

Wild garlic’s pungent aroma drifts in through the open car window — the scent of springtime, of the woods, and of the past. It makes me think of small boys in matching sets of Dunlop wellies, trampling a path through fragrant leaves and starry flowers, walking across the hidden clearing that marks the earthworks of an Iron Age hill fort. My smallest son — his hair a curled tangle of gold — holds my husband’s hand, watching from the edges.

Bows slung across their backs and wooden daggers in their pockets, the older two boys are deep in conversation, lost to an imaginative world. I wonder, watching them, whether this fort is a place where time flickers — if perhaps the story in which they have immersed themselves has come to them as a glimpse of the past. They run, then, and shout — firing homemade arrows, brandishing blunt swords. The littlest, unable to resist now, dashes towards them, whooping.

When they eventually tire, we all sit with our backs to a tree, eating gingerbread and pouring hot chocolate from a flask into dented enamel mugs. The sun is warm on our faces for the first time that year. We fill a basket with wild garlic blades — the boys’ small hands make fast work of it. The eldest plucks one final leaf, eating it fresh from the ground. Their knees and fingers are stained with green, as we walk home through the woods for Sunday lunch. My husband roasts a chicken, stuffing its cavity with the fresh garlic leaves, infusing it with spring.

Now, they are taller than me — wooden weapons long abandoned — but the woods still call them back. Sometimes, after school, they disappear into the trees with their friends, returning with muddy elbows and a faint whiff of garlic in their hair. I breathe it in as they pass me:

Spring. Time.

Here’s what I’ve been reading and loving this month: