Life...

This morning I watched the sun come up - a great big, egg-yolk yellow ball, pulsing with life. On either side of it, the clouds spread out in baby pink, fading gradually into the pale blue of the wintry sky; and down below, on the horizon, hiding behind the spidery silhouettes of a row of bare trees, lay the Chilterns, all dressed in smoky purple.
Up above me, in a hawthorn tree, a robin warbled away, singing its heart out. What a way to welcome a new day! Life doesn't get much better...

"The sky was so blue today, I just had to be a part of it..."

Yet more roses!

"The sky was so blue today, and everything was so fresh and green, I just had to be a part of it; and the Untersberg kept leading me higher and higher, as though it wanted me to go right through the clouds with it."
 - Maria in The Sound of Music

This morning we had the first real frost of the season. Well, it wasn't quite the first frost - we had a few light ones about a month ago, but this was the first one to mean business; and I very much hope it heralds the beginning of some real, prolonged wintry weather; all this unseasonal warmth was beginning to get unnerving...

 Take this week for instance. The sun has shone so strongly, and the sky has been so blue, that it has been simply crying out to me to be a part of it, and if Maria could not withstand such temptations, who I am to refuse them? I did not even try...

And while I was imitating Maria (as well as I could for a distinct lack of mountains) I thought I might as well imitate the spirit of Elizabeth von Arnim in her German Garden again. So I sat on the patio, well wrapped up in a Royal Stuart shawl, and did some sketching. All I needed to complete the picture was a little snow and some big furry gloves...

"Season of mists..."

We have been having the most beautiful late-afternoon skies recently. The sun has started setting right at the end of the garden, instead at the end of our neighbours garden as it does in the summer, and it seems to be bigger, too. Every evening (unless it's overcast) I can see it hanging in a great big orange ball, low down behind the skeletal branches of the trees; to either side the colour seeps out along the horizon, orange, golden yellow, pink, lilac, fading out at last to a pale blue.

The mornings are beautiful too, only in a different way. Most days now I awake to a thick mist lying over the fields, making the woods behind look all blue and smoky and mysterious; and up above (again, so long as it's not overcast) the sky is a translucent pearly blue backdrop behind the sun-stroked pine tree, with little golden wisps of cloud draped here and there, in a careless, artistic fashion. I do love autumn!

"This is a changing world, my dear..."

"This is a changing world my dear - new songs are sung, new stars appear; though we grow older year by year, our hearts can still be gay." - Noel Coward

The other morning I awoke to find the world wrapped in a thick autumn mist. As the day wore on, it gradually lifted from over the garden to reveal late roses still heavy with dew; above the pine tree, the thick white covering played hide-and-seek with a weak blue sky; and beyond the hedge the field remained invisible beneath its blanket.

"I tell you the truth, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies it produces many seeds." John 12: 24                                                                     

Magdalen College, Oxford

Usually October is a month of constant change - a chance for nature to adjust gradually from summer to autumn. This year however it remained late summer for weeks and weeks until, all at once, the leaves changed colour and started falling to the ground, where they lie growing in piles of firey orange and bronze, just waiting to be gleefully kicked and scattered by ecstatic children.

As the spidery sprays of bare twigs begin to appear silhouetted against the sky, which itself seems to sink lower above the rooftops - and as the evenings steadily close in, I feel as though the world is dying. Of course, I know it will come alive again in the spring, but that doesn't stop the sadness now: nature is in mourning.

I think the seasons are rather like the cycle of a butterfly, with autumn being the time when the caterpillar begins to build itself the chrysalis of winter; sometimes, what looks like death is just the beginning of greater life...

The mosaic of autumn...

What a sudden change in the weather! From the deep warmth of summer to the chill and frosts of autumn in the space of a day; it is quite a shock to the system, but I don't complain. Every season that comes around, I think is my favourite, and this is no exception.

I don't know why it is, but with all the poems there are about autumn - some extolling it, others lamenting - I have never read one that talks about its sounds. Changing leaf colours, yes; frosts and early evenings, yes; mists and "mellow fruitfulness", yes - but nothing about the great murders of crows that are now gathering, crarking away to each other as they swoop through the sky. (Isn't 'murder' a great collective noun?) No mention either of the thin but delightful music of the robins, singing to reclaim their territory in the wet early mornings, while a low pink sun rises behind them over the fields.
Funnily enough, the seagulls aren't making much noise at the moment, but their numbers have swelled considerably since the ploughing began again. As the tractors snort and grumble their way across the fields, turning over great clods of dark brown chocolatey earth, they gather in a great cloud, rising and falling, and rising again, following in the tractors wake.

Autumn is such a bits-and-pieces, patchwork of a season: part summer, part winter, it combines the mournful lament of late summer, with the expectation and anticipation of early spring. It think this quote from Stanley Horowitz describes it very well: "Winter is an etching, spring a watercolour, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all."

"Harvest now is over..."

"The harvest now is over, the summer days are gone."
                                                                          Mendelssohn's 'Elijah'

"...and the windows of heaven were opened." Genesis 7 v 11b

In between bouts of ridiculously heavy rain we have had spells of glorious sunshine. During these blissful intervals of warmth the farmer has been harvesting his crops; first he reaped the wheat, and then the oats, and now after weeks of being surrounded by a golden haze, the fields around us are rapidly becoming stubbly and brown.
One morning recently I woke up to find condensation on the inside of my window. For many days past (unless the sun is actually blazing) there has been a distinct chill in the air that nips the nose and sends shivers up the spine; the brambles in the lanes are heavy with glossy blackberries, and the apple boughs are laden with fruit; surely autumn is almost upon us...

"Have you seen the little piggies crawling in the dirt?"

There is something very soothing and comforting about a scene of livestock domesticity: lambs lying in twos beneath the shade of a clump of trees; a small herd of brown cows, lazily swishing their tails in a gently rolling field full of buttercups; a dozen piglets gamboling excitedly round a stolid sow. And though every year the individual animals of such scenes may change, yet every year these tableaux are repeated. They are like cloud-scapes - ever changing, yet ever the same, renewing themselves and repeating themselves, over and over again.