Seasonal Stocktake #1
Pumpkin gathering, pools of leaves, light through the canopy
Hello and welcome to my very first Substack post! I am hoping here to build on the wonderful community I have found since starting to produce my almanacs, and to create a place where we can all celebrate in and mark the seasons. To kick off, every week I am going to be doing this, a quick sketch almost, a seasonal stocktake, of a few things that have caught my eye, that strike me of notably NOW. It is so easy to let these moments slide by, and my idea here is not necessarily to say anything profound about them (though I might, watch out…), but mostly to mark them, and notice them, and to hear about what you have noticed too.
In addition to this I will be making some little videos here, one for each full and new moon, and a longer one on each of eight occasions through the year: midwinter and midsummer, the spring and autumn equinoxes, plus Samhain. Imbolc, Beltane and Lammas, all about the traditions connected to them and what they have come to mean to me. Making the Almanacs each year has given me lots of information and thoughts to draw on, and I want to share those with you. Sign up now and my Samhain vid will be coming your way shortly!
But, to business. Three seasonal things I have noticed this week:
The gathering of the pumpkins.
I have to admit this is not down to me. If it was down to me I might, at a push, buy and carve one pumpkin, the kids now being teenagers. But the artistic talents of my husband and children really come to the fore at this time of year and gradually in the week running up to Hallowe’en multiple pumpkins start appearing. This isn’t even all of them. We didn’t grow these, and he found this fabulously warty one in Tesco’s, of all places. They will all be transformed shortly…
A pool of leaves up at the park.
This tree and its underskirts reminded me of those fabulous images you see of autumn Ginkgo trees in Japan, which look like someone has dropped a huge pot of the paint used for double yellow lines from a height. Not quite as dramatic, here, but still very beautiful.
Light in the woods
We adopted our dogs in summer 2021 and I only started visiting our local woods with them in spring of this year. It was glorious, all green and sparkling and fluffy, as spring woodlands are. And then the canopy came in fully and…well it all got a bit gloomy and forbidding. The dogs would stick to my side all wide eyed rather than charging off into the undergrowth. I started avoiding it. Now there is still plenty of green, but the canopy has thinned out enough to let lots of light in, and I and the dogs are very happily tramping around the woods again, in pools of dappled light.
What have you noticed this week? It doesn’t have to be outdoors; I would love to hear any markers of the seasons no matter how grand or mundane. Perhaps you have finally picked up a bit of knitting you’ve been meaning to start on, or made your first crumble of the season, or lit your first candles in the evening, or just finally got around to watching Strictly.
Let me know!
I pass through a business park on my way to the gym and never noticed the few apple trees planted at one corner of the car park. But this past week, several windfall apples were lying on the mulch below. The next day, I brought my shopping bag and collected most of what lay on the ground (left a few for squirrels, birds, and other city dwellers). They came to about a kilo of apples; today I'm turning them into apple butter. :)
The smell of the leaves as I gather them up to make leaf mould compost.