Week 36
The limes, kicking things off
Hello! I hope you have all had a great week. Such a week of change here in weather and in community - the children have vanished! No more balls being kicked and rounders being played in the park, they are all tucked away back in school, pencils in hand as the rain pours down. In this household we are lagging by a week: my daughter doesn’t start college until next week and my son is back to uni at the weekend, so we have been in a bit of a limbo week, enjoying the extra time while at the same time feeling slight anxiety that everyone else has started something proper and wholesome while we just drift on in slightly aimless rainy summer holidays fashion. It’s not awful though.
THANK YOU for all of your wonderful and encouraging comments on all of the things I have been sending you recently, namely the Big Beautiful August Poem, widely hailed as a cracker, and my announcement of the publication of The Almanac 2025. We have, between us, been building this community for a couple of years now, and this week I have felt buoyed up by it.
By the way the winner of the Almanac 2025 competition has now been chosen so don’t keep applying, but you can buy copies here:
But to business! This is our weekly community post in which we share something we have noticed this week that felt particularly ‘this week in the year’ - I share mine and then you share yours. It isn’t all about nature, I love it when the rhythms of the year show in other ways too, the things you spot in the supermarket (I’m looking at you, Hallowe’en stuff…), how your meals have changed, how your daily routine has changed, a scent you caught a whiff of, all that stuff is very welcome.
I’ll go first:
The limes, kicking things off
This photo is a bit of a cheat as the rest of the park absolutely doesn’t look like this. It is still extremely green. But it is always the limes… isn’t it? Or is it? I love the idea of knowing the order of autumn colour - what goes first, what clings on til the end of November - and I slowly am gathering a sense of it. My guess is: limes, hawthorns and horse chestnuts first, maples and oaks last…everything else somewhere in between. It’s a work in progress. Thoughts?
That’s it from me. Now over to you. What have you noticed/bought/refused to buy YET/smelt/baked etc etc… this week that felt particularly ‘this week of the year’?
Leave your comments below.
The Chinese have a name for this time of year, Chushu, translates as end of heat; or maybe for the Uk a better name would have been the end of the hope of heat. This transition into Autumn is from the Chinese lunar calendar, a brief period lasting only for a couple of weeks and ending this year on the 7th September. Yesterday, as I pulled out the last of the climbing French beans, I thought the summer does change suddenly somehow in the space of a fortnight. The light, the air temperature and humidity and even the cat’s sleeping arrangements (she’s moved upstairs) have all shifted and like the late comer to the party we suddenly pick up on the vibrations all others are aware of.
This is a poem I wrote 10 years ago about this moment ….it seems to capture the Seasonal Slide quite well!
The Seasonal Slide
Summer: that golden siren, that seductress, that fickle tease
that gets us all heated up and then, without warning,
drops us smack into September without so much as a proper goodbye.
Like an engaging house guest, whose arrival we eagerly await,
summer does not overstay its welcome, but as soon as autumn arrives,
begins to slip discreetly away.
Summer satisfies to its end, offering us a reprieve from life's monotony
Days stretch out and we relax -caught up in it all - until in late August
The first signs appear alerting us that change is in the air.
Sunburns stop itching. Beaches are less crowded. The sun is lower in the sky.
Shop shelves are suddenly piled high with back-to-school supplies.
The light is different now, giving way to earlier sunsets
Slithering behind the horizon line as cooler winds off the water
whip up frothy-white bouquets of waves.
Dry leaves crunch on grass and we, who waited all year for summer's arrival, begin mourning its loss even before it's gone.
Perhaps nature intended it so. Like a passionate but brief love affair
that stops one's heart for a moment and then jolts us back to reality,
summer, too, must be short-lived in order to appreciate its splendour
a temptress, who woos us and then moves on.
But it leaves us memory gifts - so that on long winter nights,
snowbound and shivering, we recall a summer snapshot:
The sparkle of sunlight dancing on the sea, a cold beer on a scorching July afternoon, a child running along the water's edge at twilight... and the chill is momentarily forgotten.
Such was this summer: a sweet reminder of endless days, time moving more slowly
As we put our worries to one side and our lives on hold. Drifting, dreaming
as we bask in the glow of doing nothing at all, feeling, if only for a little while,
forever invincible and young.
September 2014