So, after a late brief blaze of summer season, autumn is right here. The leaves are turning, the blackberries are largely eaten. A lot of our method to the season in literature and music has a dying fall: “Nothing gold can keep”, as Robert Frost put it. Not that summer season was particularly golden within the UK this yr. Many, disadvantaged of the lengthy heat days of beach-going and picnics they had hoped for, really feel it by no means occurred in any respect. And now there’s a rising drumroll of warning about winter an infection charges, NHS overwhelm and rocketing heating prices.
True, the swifts are leaving, and geese honk throughout the sky. The mornings are darker and evenings shorter – one definition of autumn is that it begins on the equinox, 21 September, when darkish and light-weight are equal; one other relies on common temperature, and kicks the season off on 1 September – however a flock of swallows ready for the sign to go is a fantastic factor. And different birds, together with knots, waxwings, fieldfares, light-bellied brent geese and redwings are simply arriving.
The timber will quickly be of their autumn magnificence – so lovely that vacationers journey nice distances, to Canada, the jap US seaboard and Transylvania, to marvel on the sight. Scientists consider that local weather change will regularly drag leaf fall earlier, however they don’t appear to counsel that the cycle itself, of inexperienced giving option to golds and russets and reds, will stop. Forest bathing – or just being, with consideration and sensory intent, within the nearest wooden – has such well being advantages that the Woodland Belief has argued it needs to be prescribed on the NHS.
Abundance is in all places: berries (rowan, bryony, hawthorne, canine rose); a smörgåsbord of fungi; apples, pears, damsons, pumpkins, squashes, all of the grains. The final word celebration of the season in English is arguably Keats’s To Autumn – “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness/ Shut bosom-friend of the maturing solar” – which was written after a Sunday stroll in harvest-time. “How positive the air,” he wrote to his buddy JH Reynolds, “I by no means favored stubble-fields a lot as now – Aye, higher than the chilly inexperienced of the Spring. In some way, a stubble-field appears heat – in the identical means that some footage look heat.” There is one thing about noting that contradiction, between stubble and heat, the simultaneity of dying and life, the days dwindling all the way down to a valuable few, that catches at the essence of this time.
Autumn is extra refined than summer season, much less overdetermined. It is stuffed with beginnings, too. Even for individuals who now don’t have anything to do with colleges there’s a sense of beginning once more – new books, new garments, new ideas; cooler, brisker air. Berries are meals for wildlife – after which seeds on the bottom, to develop into new vegetation subsequent yr. Leaves will return to Earth, and feed extra timber. Hibernation is sleep, a conservation, and a promise. What looks like falling (pine cones, acorns, conkers, leaves) can be about beginning once more, a type of – to make use of Alice Oswald’s beautiful phrase – falling awake. So sure, autumn is right here. And that’s trigger for celebration.
