tornados in April

wildling in east London

🌿🐞

Some people have therapy, I play Call of Duty. I play Call of Duty more than 90% of people, probably. Being a mom is amazing: I tell people that after a full day with small children shooting things is necessary for my mental health, and they just believe me. They nod understandingly, and I shake my head and look down. While they’re focusing hard on empathising, my giggle to myself about actually just being quite addicted to video games goes entirely unnoticed.

Girls, women, we can be anything these days. We can be both moms AND gaming addicts. Don’t box yourselves in, ladies.

I sit right by the window while playing, and always feel the urge to open it, breathe in the night air.

“I’m cold,” I say a few minutes later.

“Well shut the window then!” my friend says.

For my soul, the April breeze in London is like a tornado in Kansas. It brings with it the smell of fresh new leaves, and the damp from surrounding canals, sometimes a faint burning smell. It’s still chilly, this fragrant air, but it comes with a promise of warmer, milder days. The angry wintry chill is gone.

“Soon,” it says. “Soon.”

And I feel a little excitement in my tummy, over nothing at all.

Just air.

🌿🐞

I’m picked up by this kindest of tornados and taken far and back, to the forest, the endless sea of green and blue and brown. The smell of pine trees, fire, and water.

In Russian there’s an expression about children who grow up without intense parental supervision. Not necessarily a bad thing, or neglectful, just free. It’s referred to growing up like “wild grass”. When I think back to my childhood, that’s what it felt like, though I wouldn’t have called it that back then. There’s no happier feeling than that.

Wild grass grows out of dirt, and we were dirt poor, so that’s oddly fitting. It grows out of dirt, its needs are few. The more you leave it alone, the stronger and taller it gets.

And you can walk on it, not like the dumb manicured park lawns that will just wither and die with the mildest pressure. “Do not walk on the grass.” God forbid.

You can tear long blades of wild grass and squeeze it between your thumbs, blow into it and make the most annoying whistling sound in the universe. You can use it to tie flower crowns, and weave baskets, make little people and whatnot.

Our parents took us wild hiking a lot. We made the annoying noises, and the flower crowns, and bracelets and whatnot. Our backpacks were filled with basic necessities, spare shoes were tied by their laces to the sides, sleeping bags strapped on top. Putting on one of these was a special process. Adults sometimes needed another adult to put theirs on. You couldn’t lean back too far, you’d need someone to give you a push from the back to steady yourself again.

Once you put your backpack on, that’s it - you’re locked in. You’re on the way.

On the way to an even less comfy place than the one you’re setting off from, likely with even more mosquitoes, steadily running out of food, clean socks, dry clothes. But there is always a stream or a river for water, and there are berries and mushrooms to pick on the way. There were always other kids there, and they were our best friends for a week.

One hike in particular stuck in my mind. It was called the Children’s Easter Hike, around this time of year. Latvia isn’t like England in April. Let’s just say the breeze tends to carry fewer warm promises. And even when days are sunny and warm, nighttime temperatures often fall below freezing.

We woke up with frost in our hair, and our socks frozen solid. The firewood was damp from the morning dew. Someone had to wake up and get the water, start the fire, make the porridge.

I remember that these tasks were often completed by my sister - she’s always been an early riser. I can’t tell you for sure if it was her or someone else because it wasn’t ever me.

Later in the morning we had to pack up our frozen socks and our damp tents back into the increasingly more chaotic backpacks and walk another 20, 30km before setting up camp again. We got lost on the last day, adding many hours to the walk. The only food we had left were some eggs. When lunchtime came, turned out the eggs went bad.

There was a boy I liked on this hike. We played pirates, climbed everything climbable. I climbed a huge tree that collapsed over the river, and fell in the water. It was equal parts freezing and really embarrassing.

We marvelled at fields full of lightning bugs at night. Lightning bugs are actually quite squishy and sort of unattractive if you pick them up. Just enjoy from afar.

I saw him again about 4 years later at a big summer solstice celebration, camping in a field in the middle of (you guessed it) the forest on the river bank. I didn’t like him like that any more.

Nowadays, I miss everything. I miss the backpacks, I miss the tiredness and the discomfort, the smells. My temporary best friends. I miss the excitement of putting the backpack on on the first day, and the relief of taking it off. It felt like you could fly. I miss cooking food and eating it outside. Food made on a real fire outside is the most delicious food you will ever have.

I miss the feeling of wilderness. I miss the smell of grass. Not the freshly mowed grass smell you get all around the city. Don’t forget to keep off the grass, for heavens’ sake!

The songs sang by the fire, often by one of my parents, who both play guitar. Yes, there was always a guitar. Even with overfilled backpacks, someone always, always found a spare limb to carry a guitar. The songs played were ones everyone knew, Soviet Bard songs, borne out of a complex, sad history and filled with longing I couldn’t even begin to understand.

Our parents and their friends, escaping to the forest together for a few days at a time all through the 80’s and the 90’s, then growing up and bringing their children along. Singing the same songs, still.

Wild grass and the strength of it, the tiny cuts long blades leave on your hands as small revenge, should you dare to disturb its peaceful freedom. 

🌿🐞

I sit by the open window playing video games in East London. I give these feelings and memories little mind. They’re always with me, anyway.

East London is as wild as it gets, probably, in this city. That’s why I like it. The parks still have lots of overgrowth, graffiti everywhere, and on my runs along the canal I go past wild flowers and tall grass, freely taking up footpath space. Nobody here minds. Yesterday, I saw an entire bicycle almost entirely concealed by undisturbed nettles, left chained to the fence for who knows how long.

I took the girls to the Big Park. I call it the Big Park when talking to children and non-locals. For those who are familiar with London, I’m talking about Victoria Park. I spent a lot of time there with Zoe when she was 2, 3 months old, reading away naptimes when I should have been sleeping.

It was the best time of my life. Just me and this beautiful stinky little baby, hiding from the heat of that summer under the shadowy foliage of enormous oak trees. There’s always small bits of wild greenery, around the ponds for the birds and tucked away into corners. Untouched by the people who, with the best intentions I’m sure, keep the greenery nicely domesticated.

I was introduced to Hackney, and Victoria Park, by a good friend. She went to Queen Mary’s university back when I was still living in Southampton. Catherine is one of those people who truly inhabits the place.

I’m not joking, I don’t even know what the road outside my window is called.

But Catherine, especially when it came to Mile End, she knew all the little details. She told me that there were parrots in the park and pointed them out. She knew also why there were parrots in the park. Where the canals went. When the Broadway market was open, and which pub had that delicious cherry beer on tap.

A few years after meeting Catherine, Jules and I moved to London and she moved to Manchester. But even without her here, my relationship with East London has been defined in part by her loving introduction. Passing houseboat after houseboat I always think of her and our idle, retrospectively (deceptively) worry-free, 2016. Before there was a pandemic, or Brexit, before she was married and before I had kids.

I think that walking with Catherine along the canals past the tall grass and the nettles and the flowers, slightly tipsy in the middle of the day, singing our own old songs, is the closest I’ve ever come to feeling that peaceful freedom I felt on our hikes.

🌿🐞

I get cold as the April breeze fills the room. “Shut the window,” my friend says.

Well, that would be missing the point entirely.