Spring Fever

It usually happens something like this:
You wake up one morning and the scent of the Winter Jasmine is flooding through the cracked-open window, smelling like rich, otherworldly bubblegum.
Sometime the next week you notice the Yesterday-Today-And-Tomorrow bush is alive with flowers of white and two shades of purple, where just the other day it was bare branches.
One day, when you get home from work, the whole garden greets you with an almost overwhelming wave of gorgeous smell. "Welcome home, look what we've been doing!".
It starts to get too hot in the office by about lunchtime, so you can take off your woolen blazer, your Witch's shawl, your leather Pit-Bull jacket.
There are green blades of grass amongst the brown ones, and the roses are covering themselves with new, dark green and glossy leaves.
Ah yes, Spring has not only come, but has settled in again. Your soul breathes out a breath of relief; a breath that was held all through the long, dry, dusty and cold Winter.
Then, sometime after the Equinox, you come down with such a fever that it's hard to make it through the day without snapping like an aged dragon at your co-workers. Your wrists and ankles pain with the forerunners of that elderly arthritis, just waiting for you, up ahead in the years. You go to bed early with a glass of lemon and honey, thanking the tree and the bees, only to crawl through terrifying vistas of wastelands running behind your house, of broken teeth uselessly grinding,and of panes of glass warped and running through your elevated-temperature brain. The next day it's really difficult to get up, so you sleep another 4, 5 hours, then read your email and type a little nonsense on your blog. But the sweat is pouring through your skin and into your pyjamas, dampening your hair and causing a miasma of unwellness to drift through the house.
You wouldn't know it to look at me, but I'm not a true child of the African heat. So I rejoice with the Swallows when they return, swooping close to the buildings, and with the Sparrows clustering close around the hose with a small leak in it, fluffing feathers and having a regular party - but I know that Spring, despite its almost inevitable 'flu, is one of the best of times indeed in the Wheel of the Year, for me - the other one being Autumn, when we can pull out of the heat and riot of fecundity with a sigh.
So for now, I'm headed back to a somewhat damp bed; there to sleep some more, in the hope that the nightmares of illness have passed this way and have now gone.