“I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring”
— W. S. Merwin, “The Love for October”
Twice now in the last two days while working I’ve been compelled to shout “Geese!” and run to the window, a wooden and mainly rotten, single-glazed scenario that once flung open violently is very difficult to get shut again, and when I do manage to haul it closed chunks of flaking paint and wood invariably fly off in a hundred directions.
If I’m not wearing my glasses then the geese will usually be impossible to see but easy enough to hear, disappearing as wings behind clouds, behind stone buildings and chimneys in their organised ‘V’ shapes, their calling unlike anything else and defying almost any attempt at description. They are like soft pencil lines drawn in the sky, fainter then fainter still, then becoming a soft smudge before vanishing altogether.
It is the season of geese. A season I wrote about at greater length here, a season that gets bundled up in so many things: beginnings, endings, semesters, the sugars in leaves brightening and throwing themselves to the ground as colour, the way winter is already detectable in the air, the closing-in of nights, the worry so many people feel about simply getting through.
Not infrequently the evenings will see us walking in loops around the small town where we live. Sometimes the loop will be a small one, just down one sloped road and across a bridge over the burn before coming back along another, less steep street. On that first sloped road, Mill Street, is a house with a garden that used to be maintained in the most beautiful way, densely green, unusual shrubs and trees and hours upon hours spent caring for it by the retired couple who lived there. The house sold this year, and since then I’m yet to see anyone out in the garden—the plants all flowered in summer but now their growth is looking more chaotic, the un-care beginning to show, and I find this sad. Some people, I suppose, do not realise or know that gardens might wish to be cared for.
Now the evenings are darker, the sun setting at around 6:30pm and this time getting ever-earlier, different things become more and less noticeable on our walks. Last night, at about 9pm, the grittiness of the town had floated to the surface, and the lights that were switched on illuminated lives not necessarily visible during the day.
On Market Street we glimpse a woman wrapped in a dark green towel on the phone in her kitchen, we see on Bank Street the lights on in rooms of homes containing people we know, and at the corner of Home Street the towering, stained glass windows of an old hotel and restaurant reveal polished wooden staircases, fire exits, and slightly dusty paintings.
One of the pubs in town, moody enough during daylight hours that you cannot see very far into the interior, at night glows strongly with the glare of shiny sport on television, its large windows displaying a suitable stage play of groups sitting around tables, beer glasses reflecting the overhead lights, the sharp look of local faces who know that in this kind of darkness they cannot clearly see anyone who might be looking in at them from the outside.
In the autumn the trees here tend to look forlorn, disappointed that there aren’t still more of them around, but the ones that have been left alone stand out even more as they try on their yellows and reds. Much like the change from daylight hours to night ones, things which have been hidden behind hedges or forests for two seasons become visible again—houses, sometimes castles, sometimes ruins, sometimes particular curves of the rivers. (The already cold water gets colder, and it becomes less appealing to get into it on a day-by-day basis.)
With rivers it is possible to observe the things which float regardless of how full the edges, or how strong the currents. For this reason it’s an interesting time of year to notice what comes to the surface of our own selves, what floats most easily.
I think when the weather cools and the energy available to us naturally dwindles, there is a usefulness in letting certain things sink a little lower, if they are heavier, and instead letting the things which do float most readily do more of the work of carrying us through until spring.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Light-flooded pieces by Naarm/Melbourne-based botanical artist and contemporary plein air painter Jessie Rose Ford.
— Inger Christensen, from “Alphabet” translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied
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Those paintings by Jessie Rose Ford are stunning! So much warmth and movement.