Autumn has arrived; a transition of colour like a Mark Rothko painting with its softened frayed edges. The introduction of a new season is never so profoundly felt as the one from summer to autumn; it’s visceral; a shift in both mind and body, but since 2014, its arrival has filled me with an unshakeable dread.
My mother died from cancer at the age of sixty-two on Christmas Eve 2014. I remember so clearly that last autumn I spent with her. I have a memory of one particular day in September that’s incredibly glaring in its ordinariness: a car journey to the local shops.
My mother died from cancer at the age of sixty-two on Christmas Eve 2014. I remember so clearly that last autumn I spent with her
That particular autumn day was draped in glorious colour, as if my mother’s life, that flickered like a candle, illuminated the backdrop of everyday existence. I pointed to the regal-looking tree-lined roads with their crimson and gold leaves: our very own fanfare. My mother commented on the beauty of the season as she sat wilting in the passenger seat. I insisted we both imbibe the joys of autumn, silently admitting to myself it maybe her last. And in that acknowledgment, I saw autumn with fresh new eyes: the quiet death of leaves that were once green, a sublimity previously unnoticed.
It’s funny how much one notices the everyday when it is under threat. That autumn in 2014 my senses were heightened; the mush of decaying leaves smelt sweet. The air that had long lost the heaviness of the summer months felt especially thin. Conversations sounded strangely poignant, as though the words spoken maybe the last. The days became currency; expensive and not made to last. I have never lived more fully than I had that autumn.
That day was twelve years ago but it plays out in my head every year when summer passes its baton. The memory is as synonymous with autumn to me as A Christmas Carol is to winter. And in that change between the seasons, summer to autumn, I feel a pregnant pause and the feeling of impending grief; the facing of the end-of-year and the end of life. The last months of my mother’s existence; the wilting, the loss of vitality and the sense of dormancy, mimicked and synchronised with nature’s own timeframe. It gave a strange and sinister new meaning to the words ‘being one with nature’.
In 2016, I moved from London to the Cambrian Mountains in Wales. The autumns I have experienced here in the countryside have softened the pain of the arrival of autumn. Though its arrival is still poignant, watching the leaves fall without a sound helps me to understand that arrivals don’t always have to be big announcements or need to be felt so sharply. The change of seasons in the countryside, although more pronounced, are gentle. There’s nothing to fear; the transitioning of seasons have always been here since the beginning of time, forever changing, yet remaining the same. It is we who change.
When I walk in my valley now I feel fully immersed with autumn – more friend than foe – and that has made all the difference. I am a part of it, this circular rhythm of life: there is no separation between myself and it. I have found both comfort and guidance in observing that in nature, although life ends, what’s left behind must carry on until the day it too must end. This may sound perhaps obvious and somewhat bleak, but embracing this has stopped me from dreading autumn.
Other autumnal feelings have made their way into my life now, they exist alongside the feeling of impending grief. I don’t have children, but come September, since as long as I can remember, I always get a ‘going-back-to-school’ feeling. I’m not sure whether this feeling will ever leave me, and I don’t want it to. I am happy to feel the perpetual child. The other night I sat up in bed reading and heard an owl in the distance as though it was announcing the long silvery nights of autumn. Instead of trepidation, I felt a sense of magic.
The season of autumn no longer feels as abrasive as it once felt. No longer the grim reaper in crimson and gold, but a season that gently teaches us about beginnings and ends. And the only lessons we really learn are the ones that are deeply felt.
Autumn feels fresh as the first day of school: a time for new challenges and a new way of being. Though it forces us to face the end of the year, it’s a time of new beginnings; as if autumn has forgiven our summer shenanigans and has wiped the slate clean.
Comments