A season woven with wonder

There’s a magical day in each season, or rather, a few salted moments of shift – an atmosphere, a temperature, a smell; the sound or sight of a particular bird or insect – that announces, softly, the next season is waiting in the wings.

We feel it bodily, sensually and often emotionally, too. Feelings that stir a raft of associative memories, that still connect us deeply with the earth’s turning, and all the other life that experiences it with us. It’s particularly powerful in spring and autumn – the year’s morning and evening, if you like – but perhaps it’s most poignant in autumn. A sign that life is moving inexorably forward, that things must change, end, and begin to begin. If we nurture a connection with nature, there is comfort and reassurance to be found.

Now, having come unsettlingly early this year, it is fully autumn, and those salted moments of shift are already beginning to prep invitation cards for winter. But not before the trees ignite in a blaze of warm colour, showing themselves in new light: fiery dogwood, toffee Beech, buttery Hawthorn and (my favourite) golden-syrupy Field Maple.

I love those evocative autumnal smells too – flowering ‘tods’ of ivy that buzz with late life, the musty-sweet, beetroot warmth of tar-spotted Sycamore leaves floating down to earth, feeding and sheltering so many tiny, important lives. All this and more is a beautiful, slightly melancholy poem to me, that I associate with: Forest’s Robe: Penhaligon’s Scented Treasury of Autumn Verse and Prose. Opening it now, the perfume still lingers.

I love, too, that though the last Swallows and martins have just left us, wild geese and winter thrushes are coming back from the north and east, with their wintry ember and ash colours. Our local populations of Blackbirds, Robins and Starlings are swelled, too.

Listen to a flock of Pink-footed Geese

Audio: Andrew McCafferty (xeno-canto)

As the days shorten, those of us who aren’t particularly early risers witness the daily magnificence of sunrise. The birds’ commutes begin to chime with ours – Rooks and Jackdaws from their roosts to the fields and back; gulls from their night-safe reservoirs and lakes, uplit with glory at sunrise or sunset, fly above our homes and workplaces to feeding grounds and back again.

I love the first appearance of the constellation Orion, cartwheeling over the wood behind the house, and the view of the big black down beyond, when the first storms have blown leafy holes through the same wood.

Hear the call of a Redwing

Audio: Patrik Åberg (xeno-canto)

It’s a season we must get out and wear, to feel it fully, to know its place in things – and our place within that. To take and make our own comforts and delights, to build our resilience, perhaps try new things, make new discoveries.

Even when an irrational fear of House Spiders, which become active in October as they breed, drives me from the house, I can find beauty in the more manageable marvel of Garden Spider webs that sparkle in dew or rain, or frost that lowers their slack rigging as they sail between grass stems. Knowing how fleeting and precious it all is.