Week 37
A pre-dawn walk
Hello and welcome to our community post in which we chart the seasons week by week. What a huge week of change it has been - or maybe I just say that every week now for a month or so? - but the temperature has dropped here and every one is autumnal. I went out to see two friends the other day and we were all wearing corduroy and tweed. There is soup and candles and woodsmoke. How easily we abandon summer! The trees are still green! But one whiff of cooler air and everyone is in the good knitwear.
In this post I tell you one thing I have noticed or done or felt this week that seemed particularly ‘this week in the year’, and then you tell me yours, and together we track the season’s changes in all of their minutiae. The more particular and personal the occurrence, the better, but we love it all. At the end of the month I gather them all up into one big poem of the month, and very lovely it is. I am going to investigate how to record September’s poem as a reading on here, as I believe it’s something you can do on substack and I think we might all like that. What do you think?
Anyway, here’s my one thing:
A pre-dawn walk
A couple of times a week I get up very early. Appallingly I have to tell you that I do this in order to go to the gym, very bright and early. This is a newish development so I can’t be too smug about it yet, but one thing I have realised is that I simply can’t do it later in the day, it really has to be before any thoughts enter my head, mostly: ‘Hmm…no actually I don’t think I will do that…’ Hurling myself out of bed and to the gym is the only thing that works.
I also love the walk there at that time of day. I live just off of a very bustling high street, always busy with traffic and people and goings on. But at that time of day it isn’t bustling, it is just yawning and stretching and waking up, the baristas in the hipster café getting the chairs down off the tables and the cakes out of the big square tupperwares, the fruit shop setting out their figs and apples, the odd bus floating into town bearing just four or five passengers. It’s been magical through the summer, and I think it might become even more so in the winter but in a different way, shop lights shining in the dark.
We aren’t there yet of course, but today was my first pre-dawn walk, when I took the dogs around the block just before I went. It seems note-worthy. I slightly dread it too of course, but it is what it is. Our corner of the world turns towards autumn.
That’s it from me, now over to you. What have you noticed or done this week that has felt particularly ‘this week in the year’?
Leave your comments below.
Celebrating retirement from the school year with a midweek jaunt to Grasmere and catching that wonderful low golden September sunlight between showers, trees awash with glittering raindrops, listening to Bob Dylan (from a nearby building site) and a woodpecker.
That sounds lovely Lia. Do you know Alan Jenkins book Morning? This week for me, some sorting and clearing in the house, bringing a wonderful sense of calm - clothes to the charity shop, new boots to replace the ones that I‘ve never liked and have always been uncomfortable, burning the last of the brightly coloured candles I bought for the summer and stocking up on ones in beautiful autumn colours from the shop down the road that has been here since I arrived as a student here in Sheffield 41 years ago.