Late January in Marrakech. No rain since October but still there's a lushness from mountain snow-waters, the soil more than happy to quick-harvest olives and brew its avocados. In the city's main square, the Djemaa-el-Fna, in the shadow of the Koutoubia mosque, everywhere you pass there are tea sellers — tea with mint, or with mint and sage, some absinthe-vivid, some dark like they serve it in the desert, in a tooth-rasping molasses gloop.
And then there are the juice men: piling and squeezing endless oranges, far sweeter than those in Spain or California, as are the grapefruits, as large as melons and the deep orangey pink of trout roe. It's warm now during the day, the sun rising at seven, seeming to set the whole sky on fire over the Atlas Mountains, quickly burning away and leaving behind an optimistic blue. But still the locals go about in their thick jackets and scarves. This is winter, and to be savoured. Come June the heat will have fallen hard across the country in a barrier of fire, challenging even the locals' quickness of spirit.
Everywhere you feel the memory and anticipation of this heat. In the rose colour of the earth and buildings, in the holes carved into the wattle and daub walls of the old city (so the baking winds of the summers can pass through without bringing them down). In the tagines cooked for hours so their mutton and chicken falls from the bone in a swoon. In the incredible sweetness of the cinnamon sugar on pastries and biscuits that puts you on a high, rousing you from a 4pm vagueness. In the tea and the tea with its herbs that remind you of the possibility of spring and water and green.
