London is blooming this morning.
It rained last night, the drops crackling on the plastic sheeting that covers the bricks outside our front window. We fell asleep to the lullaby of water rushing down the black iron downspouts.
But this morning, London is dripping with sunshine.
It won’t last. In England, this day will be patchy with storms and beloved sunny intervals. But I cling to this lovely moment. I twist back the curtains and watch commuters and schoolchildren hustle by the window, eastbound toward the Tube, the light glowing on their faces.
Though the sky overhead is blue, the sun on the horizon hasn’t burned off the haze of wetness; it casts a sheen of golden filigree over the air.
I am not outside, but I can see it is cold from the damp night: hands are jammed in pockets, hats pulled down to eyebrows, scarves tied up to chins. But the sun warms the edge off the morning and the commuters walk with a swing in their gaits.
There are two Londons on any day: the scabby, homeless miserable coldsore of a day, when light refuses to reveal itself from under piles of past-date, clotted cream clouds. The night comes welcome on those days, obscuring the misery and giving the city’s inhabitants an excuse to wile away darkness in their own perversions, habits and slovenliness.
But then there are the sunny intervals, the sun breaking free of its captor, glorious in its hour or two in the yard. It carves space for itself in any corner: entwined in the leaves on the ivy plant, on the folds of a bundled coat, between the lapping waves on the pond in St. James Park, on the tiniest drop of dew on a petal of a drooping pink germanium in a flower box in Queen’s Park. It makes warm love to miles of brick and mortar, then flirts with years of paint on the wrought iron gates and balconies.
It floods into a chorus of rooms simultaneously, harmony in color and light; and then, suddenly, like a child snatched to safety by its mother, it disappears again.
This morning, outside this window, the sun is reminding the wet, blacktopped road of its molten tar days again.
London is chilly rain and miles of buildings and cold people pushing ahead.
But then an interval strikes, and London is brilliant starlight in the daytime and ribbons of emerald and sapphire and burning hearts dreaming of illumination.
