Autumn

Fade and winnow down into darkness, and why don't we make the best of it while we can?

You can’t have failed to clock the daylight fading? By now you’ll know that dawn has become a workday normality; that night falls when you’ve hardly made sense of your afternoon.

Autumn is a fair time to walk in the darkening hills and think of all that sunlight you pissed up the wall in June and July. Remember how angry it made you when, as a child, you were sent to bed on summer nights when it was broad daylight outside? Remember how you railed at the loss of that time, swearing to yourself that if you could only grow up, you’d never waste the possibilities of sunshine?

So does it not bother you to break that promise every summer now you’re grown? When did you start to care that it’s time for bed; that you’ve work in the morning and deadlines to meet? By Christ, you’re lucky the boy you were can’t see you now - now that you’ve haltered yourself in a stall.

In the face of rising darkness, perhaps you’ll take a little solace from a few autumn days which come stitched together in a semblance of stability. Perhaps you’ll find the season that you hoped for in a week of fine weather - golden days for golden leaves and the din of a stag in the corries. Having failed to grab your childhood summer, it would be sensible to grab this now because it’s clearly all you’re getting. And before you know it, a wind’ll swing (as winds do swing) to bring rain or a sense of dullness. You’ll wake to find it’s dark for an hour longer in the morning, and comforting yourself, you’ll say “ach, it’s just the weather - Autumn can’t have vanished overnight”.

And you’re almost right, because chances are that fair weather will return in a day or two. The light’ll widen slightly, and it’ll feel like a recovery. But there is no coming back from that first impact, and when rain drives in for a second or a third time, you’ll begin to see the shortfalls plainly. So with every descending step into winter, each setback of darkness or fog will be restored with something fainter; each rally will reveal some fresh absence until, in a mass of low cloud and heaviness, you’re unable to recall the last fine day. And you’ll say

this must be how it feels to grow old.

From Bog Myrtle and Peat - October 2020