My belief in nature winning is reinforced every year by the awakening of spring in Wellington. It is a mysterious phenomenon that arrives in a manner that the countryside does not even come close to copying. It is a weird thing that spring in the city is not traditionally celebrated with poems or songs, no paintings are entitled Spring on Lambton Quay, neither is there a fragrance called Cuba in October.
The early buds of spring creep from dark caves of buildings stacked in scaffolding and wrapped in plastic. All winter, these caves have been protecting and building energy for the emergence of orange-clad construction workers. The first few step carefully through the concrete desolation where the city has been stripped back to grey, hard-cornered structures.
At first, the construction workers keep back in the shelter of buildings. They are difficult to see, but occasionally there’s a flicker of orange in the corner of my eye and I know they are coming back.
Days pass and small clusters of orange vests join together to form blooms dotted throughout the city. They begin to fill the footpath outside the construction sites and there is a soft murmur in the clusters, the murmur that I recognise as the call to the city to come out and celebrate spring.
Spring progresses with the same pattern every year, but I still exclaim over every step.
The second step is World of Wearable Art flags that leap up power poles, seemingly overnight. They are not there one day, then the next day, each pole is adorned with a small, colourful flag. The flags are alive to variations in the spring weather. They flutter in the wind or stick in limp, wet triangles. There is beauty in the symmetry of each flag the same as the next, each flag reacting to the weather the same way. As spring comes into fullness at the end of October, the flags are gone, as quickly as they appeared.
The month moves on slowly but deliberately. The tables and chairs belonging to cafes and coffee shops that have spent the winter sitting as sad grey obstacles on the footpath, lonely and bare like a deciduous tree, start to find colour. Adventurous customers arrive early in the season, wearing their black winter coats and scarves but adding vitality and optimism that spring is here and it is time to leave the safety of the office buildings.
Painstakingly, spring advances, encouraging office people and their lanyards to venture out and sit at tables, and then the air is full of the scent of spring. The smell of coffee, Lynx, cough lollies and curry mix in a heady perfume.
Office people wear subtle colours, but there are more of them, filling the footpaths and lightening the streets, softening the hard corners of winter.
Spring awakens the coupling need. The spring murmur becomes louder as people talk and laugh, chuckling deeply into their coffee cups and occasionally shrieking with joy. Groups form to celebrate the individuals who use the combination of coffee styles and alternative milk choices to establish their unique position in the group hierarchy.
The orange vests are out in full now. They spread exuberantly away from their buildings to find concrete spaces to fill in intricate patterns.
At this stage, when spring is fully under way and Wellingtonians are absolutely sure that winter has been beaten, city people jettison the last trappings of winter.
The hard protective umbrella shells are discarded, some thrown in the streets, as finally there is freedom from the tyranny of winter.
