#30secondsofcalm

November is the new September...

Dear readers, friends, family and curious passers-by, you are welcome on this blustery day. A shout of welcome also to the flurry of new subscribers blown in with the wind — I am delighted you here.

September is the new November here…

I wake this morning to a different sound; as the light of day creeps through the cracks in the shutters, for the first time in too many days I cannot hear rain, oh but the wind is wild!

An audacious, chuckling ‘wildling’ untethered from the North is chasing Constable clouds across the hill, swooping down into the valley howling with delight and gleeful mischief through the beeches whose leaves, still green and not ready to fall, tremble on branches in fear of its force.

It is ferociously cold for September!

I am wearing enough clothes to hike an alpine desert, or perhaps not but you get the idea! And now, thoroughly chilled in this unseasonable northerly blast, I succumb to opening the ‘winter-box’. Woollen sweaters and scarves, hats and gloves, old ski suits and thermal this and that tumble out, I am uncertain whether to feel deliciously cosy or simply depressed. I light stove. It’s bloody freezing!

I don’t have any news today, I haven’t walked my hill nor had occasion to converse with the trees, they can’t hear me speak for the howling and they’re too busy clinging onto their leaves! My hare and muse is but a latent dream, although I swear I saw those black tips of ears on whiskered face crouch as I stood at the meadow gate - he saw me first… ducked into the wild carrot, shapeshifter that he is and blended, as he so cleverly knows how and I do not.

I am windswept down the lane with eddies of leaves, that shouldn’t be falling, to the pine forest. Here, for as long as the wind allows, I bathe in the scent of pine needles and damp moss, listen to wind whistling through their tips. A buzzard flies out, disturbed no doubt by my scent and a red squirrel, the first I have seen all year, scurries up the only Canadian Maple oak on the hill.

An elysian few seconds held in compliant reverie as I realise there is no escape from this early autumn air.

I feel a hint of a smile, I’m still cold but the pleasure is undeniable.

“Trees, it turns out, have a completely different way of communicating: they use scent.”
― Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Tree

With windswept love