Bloom With Us: Noticing the Season This Spring

There's a particular kind of light that settles in by October. You've probably felt it by now; mornings that arrive alreayd warmed up, evenings that stretch well past when you'd expect them to, and whole afternoons balmy enough to eat outside without a second thought. Spring has had a few weeks to properly arrive, and by now it is here beyond a passing glance.

We love this stretch of spring for how established it feels.

As we explored in The Science of Spring, flowering plants release a surge of pollen, spores and microbial matter into the air as the season turns, and by October, that exchange between outside and in has had weeks to settle into a rhythm. The smell of spring by now is just how the air smells; an ecosystem that's been awake for a while, and alongside us the whole time.

Most of us move through our homes on autopilot. We know where the light switch is without looking, we open the same cupboard for the same mug every morning. That familiarity is comfortable, but it also means we stop actually seeing the spaces we live in, even once the season around them has changed. A few weeks into spring is a good moment to check whether you've actually adjusted, or whether the room is still asking to be noticed and you've simply stopped listening.

Spring is also, still, an invitation to leave the house altogether. If September was the first tentative step outside, October is where it becomes a habit, longer evenings that make an after-dinner walk routine, warm enough afternoons to read outside instead of on the couch, the pull to get your hands in soil that's had a full season to come alive. It might just mean breakfast on the stoep has become the default, or that walking calls have replaced the ones taken sitting still. Spring, by October, has had time to embrace us. 

This is worth protecting, especially now.

Much of daily life runs on habit loops precisely because conscious noticing takes effort, and the brain tends to default to routine wherever it can, including new routines formed a few weeks ago. The season's opening act may have passed, but the invitation to keep noticing hasn't.

If spring asks us to notice the world outside, it's fair to ask the same of the world inside. A home that feels alive keeps responding to the season, not just on the first warm day;

• Opening windows longer, and more often, not just for airflow but as a small daily ritual of letting the outside in

• Letting light reach rooms it hasn't reached all winter, moving a plant, pulling back a curtain that's stayed closed

• Noticing what's changed in your own routines by now, and which of those new habits are actually worth keeping

We've spent this season talking about the invisible garden that lives across our homes, the microbial life we can't see but that's there regardless of whether we notice it. Noticing the season, weeks into it, is, in a small way, practice for that same kind of attention. It's the discipline of paying attention to what's alive around you, whether that's a windowsill catching new light or your home's living, breathing microbiome.

By October, Spring asks us to keep noticing the sun as it settles further into our days and evenings. So, we're still smelling the flowers this spring, and we hope, weeks in, you're still noticing yours too.