Whenever the season changes, there are old songs that play in my head as I walk through the cemetery. They replay because they were part of previous seasons, and maybe because they speak to this season of my life.
If I’m in a melancholy mood, I get the Eagles’ “The autumn leaves have got you thinking…”
I try to switch that one off. I love the song, but I don’t believe that any of it was wasted time. I like who I am; I love where I am in my life; I would not change a second of it. Absence and pain notwithstanding.
It’s too early in the season for Autumn leaves, but they are here. Perhaps the trees have reckoned with their internal dryness and decided to let go early, conserve their reserves. Everything is seeding and shedding. Autumn may be early this year because the Summer has been so harsh. What that means for the year to come, I have no idea.
Or perhaps this is all misperception. Perhaps it is just that the shift from Summer to Autumn sneaks up on me so quickly these days. I don’t think so. I’m sure that August was always still Summer. In our family at any rate. The last two weeks of August, we would be camping. We would be spending days on beaches, swimming in seas, trailing round ruined castles, playing until nightfall.
Only: when you’re young you don’t necessarily pay attention to nightfall. If you’re already tired and ready for an hour of drinking coke and listening to music, playing the arcades, before happily crawling into a sleeping bag, perhaps you don’t bother looking at the clock.
Part of my ‘ready to grow young again’ ethos includes trying not to look at the clock.
So here we are: heading into the last days of August and I am feeling the seasonal shift.
In the last week the temperature dropped from a high of 34 degrees C, to 18 degrees C at midday. Crawling a little higher on occasion, but still feeling distinctly cool after the onslaught.
Some rain arrived and we’re still at the ‘grateful for it’ stage in terms of an initial response, but already I’m hearing people talking about driving conditions and the unpleasantness of being out in it. It’s only two weeks or so since we were excited enough by rain to go and stand outside to feel it on our skin. I’m still stopping what I’m doing to watch it splash on the garden furniture, plitter-runnel down the windows. I’m still opening windows to listen to it.
But I’m also thinking that I’ll not be over-enamoured if my upcoming two weeks on the island are cold and wet. I’ll still walk, and swim, and write…but hand-on-heart I’d like a warm dry couple of weeks in which to do those things. Mostly.
“Mostly”, because I have to put it in the context that we’re moving towards September. This is harvest season. We’re well past Lughnasadh (Lammas), the harvest of first fruits. In my garden the blackberries came in early, and are finished now. I had a few peaches. As we head towards Mabon (the Autumnal equinox) and second harvest I’ve picked the last of the year’s apples, but the
pears are still hard and need more time to ripen. Aubergines and cucumbers will stay in the ground until they stop giving. My Dad would be astonished that I’m picking outdoor grown tomatoes.
We’re planning to rebuild my raised beds, so a lot is being allowed to go to seed this year, and the exhausted plantings will be uplifted. The strawberry plants have gone already. The oregano hasn’t survived the drought. The basil is hanging on valiantly, but I’ll rely more on its kitchen window-sill cousin.
I’m more saddened by what I’ve lost this Summer in terms of the background structure of the garden. The wooden framework that I loved so much when I first moved in.
We took down the bamboo corner seat, because it was beginning to fall apart, and because I had never used it the way I thought I would. It frees up a corner spot for the Water Carrier where she will be more visible.
I’m more upset about the Japanese fence screens. I loved those, their shape, their colour, form and function…but they were also too rotten to rescue, succumbed to rain and turkey tail. I had hoped they could be replicated, but although my man keeps saying that it could be done, I see no way of that happening.
It feels like the garden is falling apart…almost like I’m having to start over, and not wanting to let go of how it was. It seems to have been too short a time to enjoy it. I need to remind myself that I have had seven years of that first incarnation of my tenure here…and how many times it has already shifted. Gardens are living creatures, I remind myself. They are not monuments to a moment in time.
I remember the people who were in my life then, and are not here now.
I remember that there was the time I let the back end grow to thigh-height, just to see what would come up, and how much work it was to cut it down again.
I’ve had years with poppies – and without them – and then again with.
I miss the scent of white campion and wonder what I need to do to bring it back.
I cut the blackberry hedge down to the ground the year before last and had to wait those two years for this year’s bounty. I will be less harsh this year, but maybe every few years that needs to be done and a fallow year is the price to pay. It's hard to tell what is the product of intervention and what is the result of the wayward nature of our new weather.
We took out a lot of the back-end shrubbery this year, freeing up another corner to become something else. I’m not sure what. Yet. One of the shrubs refuses to yield. Maybe we can come to terms, if I go and cut back every other week.
Potato plantings were not particularly successful, but I may try that again.
The pear tree is in overdrive – and I’ve realised that the reason I thought they were inedible was because I’ve yet to learn to judge their ripeness. They take a long time to soften up. Much more so than the apples and peaches.
We’ve had a hot-hot summer. Unknown temperatures in the mid-thirties degrees centigrade, and there’s a sense that this is not a 1970s long-hot-summer one-off event; there’s a gathering certainty that this will become a regular thing. I don’t know. Last Summer, I seem to remember, was mostly cool, mostly wet.
There are dire warnings about next year being an el niño year. I heard similar warnings for this year. I don’t think anyone really knows what is happening. Temperatures are rising (air and sea). Extreme weather events are increasing. I read somewhere that we’re overdue for a switch in polarity between the North and South Poles. Other than my assumption that my compass will then point Due South, rather than Due North, I have no idea what that will mean. Perhaps all the birds that navigate by means of the magnetic map of the earth will become confused.
Or perhaps they will shrug their feathered shoulders understanding these things far better than I do, and carry on as normal.
Meanwhile, here and now, the Summer becomes Autumn, and the songster in my head is Stevie Nicks...
And the summer became the fall
I was not ready for the winter
It makes no difference at all
'Cause I wear boots all summer long
I return to those words every year. There was a time that I wore boots all Summer long. Now, I’m more in tune with Nadine Stair who would "start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.” Me, too, Nadine, me too.
Only I'm not waiting on second chances, I'm doing it now. I’m still barefoot – or near-to it – most of the time. I haven’t been in boots for months. I’ve been in trainers for wet-day walks, and for gym sessions, but otherwise I’ve been in trekking sandals, or beach shoes (because we have weever fish in these parts), or garden clogs for spade use, or literally barefoot.
I am not ready for Autumn. I am still in denim shorts, worn over swim-suits, and walking my home and garden barefoot as often as not.
I still have a two-week islanding ahead of me.
And yet…the summer became the fall, I was not ready…
It happened suddenly. The temperature dropped. Darkness fell. I found myself closing the blinds earlier than I had been used to, and lighting the candles on my hearth.
That was it.
That was a personal boundary crossed. I am now lighting evening candles…that is Summer’s transition to Autumn. I still think of my island retreat as a Summer holiday, but perhaps I need to
reconsider.
How might the experience of it change if I go into it thinking Autumnal rather than Summery?
Or perhaps by adopting that fifth season from the Chinese calendar that we have no name for: late-Summer / Indian-Summer – a somewhere no-longer-Summer, and not-yet-Autumn.
Our descriptors for such things are formed in childhood. Autumn to me is back-to-school. It’s shedding short socks for knee-highs, sandals for shoes, shorts for skirts and slacks. Autumn is rain. More grey skies than blue ones. It is moving from salads to soups.
I am not ready.
I will be islanded soon and I equate the island with Summer. I want to walk. I want to swim in the sea at Fermain. I want to do things I have not done in all the years I have been going there. Go places I have not yet been. I want the Summer to continue long enough for me to do those things in warm and dry weather…I want the rain to wash through overnight…though I will swim regardless.
In the meantime I have this shifting of the seasons at home. The cooler weather. This thing called rain. Leaves falling, dry, crunching underfoot. Grass thinking maybe it has time to wake up and put on a spurt. Days noticeably shorter. Fairy lights and candles.
Another year spinning slowly towards its close.
I am not ready. It is too soon to be thinking such thoughts.
But even if I am not ready for the Winter, it also makes no difference, because I will barefoot my way through as much of that as I can, at least indoors, at least until the cold insists I wear socks, and there are boots somewhere abouts for walking in whatever the next weather will be.
Still...I will cling to Summerness, look to the flowers, the feel of sun and soft breeze (and, ok, maybe soft rain) on my skin...for just a little longer.
*The title and verse extract are taken from the song Nightbird, by Stevie Nicks. If you don't know it: go listen:
Stevie Nicks - With Lori Nicks - Nightbird - Live on Solid Gold - HD 1080p 3Mbit - 1983
The Nadine Stair quote is from her poem "If I had my life to live over".
"Ready to grow young again" is from Bruce Springsteen's "No Surrender"
