by Gillian Taber

Created on: March 15, 2011

For me, there are so many associations, turning points in my life, which happen around spring. Living in England, spring break isn't anything to do with crazy holidays in the sun with school friends. It is about family and that run in towards Easter. It brings back memories of a childhood peppered with bright shafts of spring light which occasionally bleached out the grinding misery.

Spring break for me is that two week period just before Easter weekend. Never often enough, this was the time of a trip out as a family. Dad would be home and he would drive us down to Hampshire, to visit Auntie Anne. Those trips into the countryside have remained with me, inspired and bolstered me across more years than I care to admit to, but let's just say it's a lot.

Those holidays were filled with green and blue, literally colouring everything that comes to mind. I think they are also the reason I have never painted a room I live in in those colours. Blue and green are not 'indoor' colours, should never be painted onto mere brick walls. Nothing man manufactures can ever capture the colours nature paints with, can only ever be pale imitations. There are subtleties in nature, levels of colours which no machine can hope to match. Pick up a spring leaf and look into it. I mean really look. Stare into that leaf until you begin to sink into it and you'll find there are more shades of green in a single leaf than you ever imagined or thought possible.

Blue is the sky and always will be. It is the April sky which changes its mind and colour at a whim. One minute it is blazing above in a blue so vibrant it is almost painful to look at. The next it is bleeding through with grey and white and rain teems down as the shadows race ahead. It is blue shot with lacy ribbons of white cloud. It is blue shading into golden twilight, evening chasing the crows back to their huge nests in the barely budding trees. It is blue filling my eyes as far as I can see whilst I lay on my back and stare up, watching swifts perform their acrobatics on nature's finest backdrop.

Green is renewal. Green is the grass slowly beginning to grow once more, the thought of checking the lawnmower before its first use of the season. Green is pussy willows, yellow branches swaying, seductive in their veil of pale green buds. Green is spring flowers poking trusting spires through the earth and stretching out beneath the welcome return of the sun and its radiance. Green is fields filled with lambs running around, crazy with

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