Season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and exceedingly fat spiders

The kids are back to school and therefore it’s a return to the 6.30am alarm that I’d been free from for six blissful weeks. Two weeks in, and we’re starting to notice that, whilst not dark, it’s not exactly light out there at that time now either. This is always a blow to the Bradford family. Between us all, we’ve had 85 years’ experience of it getting darker in the winter yet it somehow takes us by surprise every autumn.

We are prone to getting a bit glum as the light leaves, so we’ve worked on a ‘lovely list’ on the theme of the colder months. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

• that lovely misty light in the morning that picks out enormously fat-bodied spiders sitting on their vast webs (although not so good when you walk through the aforesaid webs on your way to feed the chickens in the morning…)
• it being cold enough at night to snuggle under the duvet without wanting to kick it off five minutes later
• open fires
• coming in from the cold and warming up with a good cuppa (or, even better, a hot chocolate)
• tights and boots (this was obviously just the female members of the family…)
• satsumas and clementines
• frost – we love to examine all the pretty patterns on the windscreens of the cars parked on the route to school
• red wine really comes into its own when the weather gets colder
• the leaves turning – achingly beautiful
• bonfire night
• hallowe’en
• Christmas
• soup
• being inside and warm with nowhere we have to go to when it’s dark/cold/raining outside
• seeing the sunrise when you’re making your morning cuppa
• kicking up leaves
• conkers
• snuggly jumpers
• porridge for breakfast
• board games and books
• snow (a very rare treat round these parts!)

Any more? Please add your thoughts!

love the brown leaf days too

it made me smile that, whilst waiting for this picture to upload, the accompanying message said 'crunching...'!

 

This is the picture my girls made with their dad after an afternoon’s leaf collecting. What fascinated me was that each of the leaves we picked up really stood out from the others around them at the time they were chosen – they were something special amongst the duller, browner leaves surrounding them. Yet, when they were all put together in this picture, some acted as the duller background themselves. It made me think about how we live in a world of relativity – how can we truly know happiness if we’ve never felt sad? How can we measure beauty without some implied aesthetic scale? If we lived in a world of infinite resources, fairly shared, would it mean anything to be described as ‘wealthy’?

 

So life is lived in a series of ups and downs, of days that stand out from the others like a glorious sunshine yellow leaf, and of the dull brown leaf days that serve to make that yellow leaf day so radiant. Wouldn’t it be great to always be aware of how our ‘ordinary’ brown-leaf days are part of a huge autumnal picture, our life as a whole, seen from a step backwards? And don’t they just make those other days shine?

 

What colour and texture leaf would your day be today? When was your latest yellow leaf day? Remember it in detail and make yourself smile!