autumn - the antithesis
Kilos of quince - logs and chimneys, smoke and ash...
“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Before I begin, I’d like to welcome the lovely flurry of new subscribers I’ve had over the last week or so. I am delighted to have you here. You can read more about what to expect from my letters here and more about me and my life in France here - and if you don’t have time, I wish you an enjoyable romp through my meanderings and the chaos of our (vaguely) self sufficient life in the Aveyron SW France in the letters that will follow. Thank you so much for being here.🍂
In my last letter, Fur coats and bikinis - I wrote of all I love about autumn…
I took you by the hand for a wander through sweet September. It was beautiful, warm, filled with gentle days and yet, here we are, one truly glorious gift of a week into October already and summer days are hanging on. There isn’t a golden leaf in sight!
The weather hasn’t caught up with the season.
Autumn is upon us yes, the equinox passed, but at the beginning of the week and again for the foreseeable few days at least, we are still basking in temperatures of 30c and over. Unbelievably, I hear noises about lighting stove from my dearly beloved. I just stare at him, for once unable (luckily for him) to find words to express my incomprehension. Creating yet more heat couldn’t be further from my thoughts. How to keep my winter crops alive in a veggie patch with no water because the well has been dry since august and all my reserves are empty, yes. Whether to buy another bale of hay for the sheep because they’ve already eaten, or rather spread over half the field because they play in it! Either way, most of what I thought they’d need for the entire winter is gone. When exactly, I will find time to turn the soil and reseed the bottom field, destroyed by two years of record temperatures, also but lighting stove absolutely not!
Obviously my silence was misunderstood though. I return home from work on the second consecutive hottest recorded day of October to find my kitchen looking suspiciously clean and tidy. Along with the temperature, this is not normal!
I swept the chimney, says my husband with a big grin.
And fixed the fire bricks… waiting for praise no doubt.
Which, of course, I give abundantly because he really has done an amazing job. There isn’t a speck of soot anywhere. The vacuum cleaner is away and the bucket of soot disposed of. I don’t ask where…
I still refuse to light stove.
I can’t, I simply can’t, not for as long as is bearable, begin the war with stove!
The mere thought of hauling logs up and down the eleven steps to the kitchen door, battling with a smoky kitchen filled with wood ash every time stove feels hungry is simply insane when it’s still so hot outside.
I don’t need any unnecessary reminders of proximity to the long dark and oppressive days of winter. My rather 1frileux husband however, thinks differently, so differently I could write a whole other story, perhaps another day though. Were he to have his way, the moment the temperature drops below 20c (which it hasn’t) stove would be a roaring inferno sufficient to match the heat of the hottest of summer days. It is a petite dispute we’ve had many times, one I don’t usually win but this year, I insist, an extra layer or two will do, at least until November.
Autumn equinox, that turning point in the year, half way between the longest and shortest days. Already there are not enough hours in the day. I can feel autumn hysteria rising like a tide, higher and higher until it engulfs me. I’m told to stop panicking. Foolish words indeed, it never helps to tell a person in a panic to stop, it just doubles the intensity!
The mornings are dark and evenings fade into night so quickly even top gear isn’t fast enough to complete the necessary chores each day. Every morning I juggle a bucket of grain and a sack of hay with a torch down through the woods for the sheep, all the while peering through the dark for Rambeau just in case he’s in an ugly mood. I walk Wolfie, his lead in one hand, my very heavy wild boar stick just in case in another and a somehow a torch too. The tiny path through the plum trees down to the chicken coop, such a blossom filled pleasure in spring and summer becomes an exciting slippery slide through wet branches and soggy leaves on which I often land on my behind, necessitating another change of clothes. I eat my breakfast in the car, driving too fast on single track lane down to have Seth at his school bus exactly on time because the driver, an evil dragon of a woman, won’t wait, not even a minute longer than 08h00. I arrive in my class so often with hay in my hair or on my clothes I have lost count of the number of times someone has asked if I enjoyed a roll in the hay! I’m permanently disheveled.
I feel like a part time circus act!
An act that has become almost more farcical by the day. By the weekend I stare, stupefied by an impossible amount of plums, apples and quince, all piled into boxes, bags and buckets donated by work colleagues and neighbours. It really is impossible to say ‘No’ to anyone here, a gift is a gift in France and woe betide anyone who attempts even a polite decline! This means that I have to find more time in between my necessary paying work, the animals, the garden and my family. I spend every single spare second loading and turning plums then unloading prunes from the dryer, drunk on their heavenly scent of course! With what’s left I make sweet plum chutney, (my alternative to mango) to eat with a good hot curry - not very French I know but well… curry! And then, after potting apples and baking spiced apple cakes for whoever will take them off my hands, the battle with that most contrary of all fruit, the quince, begins. Why I leave them to last I will never know, but I do. Every year!
To me the fervent impatience for autumn to arrive is misplaced, I get it, I really do - I wasn’t lying when I said those words - I love the colours, the candles and the cosiness of it all, the nuts and fruit, woodsmoke (on the outside of my kitchen) even the piles of leaves and especially wearing cosy jumpers and scarves - have I told you about my scarf obsession? - all of this and more. Autumn is as beautiful as every other season, they all have their piece de resistance to present us, to enthrall the senses and wrap us up in after all. But, to me, this season of coppery leaves and cinnamon light is a time of deep melancholy. It marks the last days of the year when we can eat al fresco, when warmth is a possibility; being a June baby of southern ancestry I am a sun girl so that makes me sad. Seeing the last flowers whither and die even sadder. Livestock is herded into winter quarters, the meadows appear empty and listless and sad too. The roe deer, the hare and the pine marten are less visible, I miss each and every brief glimpse. The wild boar though are not only ever present, they have tripled in number through summer. A fact which heralds six months of hunters with their shotguns and howling dogs as they spend their weekends roaming the hill in order to cull them.
Autumn feels so final…
Like the sound of doors closing everywhere, a sort of battening of the hatches lest the cosiness should escape. And, really, unless you are someone who loves the winter months more than any other — I have heard spoken of such strangeness though I fail to understand it — there is little to look forward to at the end. Unlike all the other seasons.
Because I can’t (ever) leave anything on a negative note, I will just add again, how the light in autumn is so often beyond words beautiful, the dew returns, cooler mornings fill the valley with waves of mist and those alone are reason to rejoice despite all the difficulties.
“What the light looks like in the pear trees, in October, is a hundred teardrops of gold, the whole orchard weeping.”
― Carole Maso
Enjoy Autumn lovely readers, I will continue my juggling! X
I read many letters and publications about autumn (its a hot topic at the moment) this week, here are some that I loved.
Nadia Henderson writes from Sweden and has similar feelings as mine about our obsession for autumn…
But, for me, autumn has always brought with it a sense of discomfort; a melancholic angst as I feel myself pulled between past, present and future.
Lia Leandertz publishes the most wonderful weekly almanac which take us wandering with beautiful detail through all the seasons of the year.
And Renee Eli Ph.D, writes with such a deeply knowledgable understanding of human belonging one not only feels entwined by her narrative but spellbound by the individual words themselves, each one a poem leading to the next and the next.
Frileux - adj/masculin meaning someone who is very sensitive to the cold - a chilly mortal. (Frileuse - feminine)
I love your writing! I was right there with you. not wanting anything to do with stove. Loving your photographs, too! So beautiful!
I'm going to go heat another mug of apple cider, tighten the wrap of my oversized sweater, move to the porch, and look out at the pasture with its edges of trees, turning orange and red and yellow. I do this because I want to read THIS again. Your words. What you share about this season.
And because of this (to which I all too familiar) - "begin the war with stove!"