Enter Autumn

Hooray September is here! I love Autumn with every fibre of my summer-indifferent body, and then some. Days where the chill of the morning brushes against your fingertips as you walk along misty towpaths, the smell of bacon and woodsmoke coming from the barges moored up alongside. The particular silence of a frosty start, every leaf etched with silver, the bite of cold making your nose tingle, sounds of the day muffled. Evenings with the curtains drawn, the candles lit and the smell of a slow cooked stew filling the air. Hats and gloves. Scarves bringing a touch of colour and class to the most basic of outfits. Socks and boots. Hot chocolate and a book under a blanket. Log fires…

I mean, I could go on raphsodising for pages, but I imagine you get my gist by now.

This autumn has a particular resonance for me as my summer was so busy. I lost whole days of it spent travelling to meetings, or in meetings or waiting for Zoom to load my next lot of meetings. I’ve talked a lot for me this summer, no wonder I developed a sore throat. My recommendation: pine needle tea with a drop of honey - that knocks any cold out before it has time to take hold.

So now I’m looking forward to the turning inwards that comes along naturally with autumn. I’ve planned some long sessions at the allotment, getting it ready for winter. The potatoes are all up, the beans picked and the last of the beets are nearly ready. The raspberries are popping out faster than stars in a night sky, so my preferred method of eating them (straight from the bush, warm from the sun) has given way to harvesting them for eating back at home, or freezing to bring splashes of sunshine to grey February mornings.

I really love the act of harvesting and processing the harvest…perhaps even more than I do the growing of things, fraught as that is with worry over slugs, diseases, bad weather etc. One of my earliest memories of my Nan’s house was her pantry with the shelves full of pickles, chutneys and jams: they gleamed like jewels with the promise that we’d be fed and looked after. Her pickled onions were legendary. She’d grown up with wartime, and post war, rationing so understood the value of a preserve. What couldn’t be eaten could be preserved and what couldn’t be preserved could be fermented*, and what couldn’t be fermented could feed the pig.

There is nothing like a wartime Nothern upbringing to make sure you use up everything. Although we prefer never to speak of my Grandad’s wine…if you needed to take the rust of a metal gate, that was your best bet. Drinking, not so much.

Back to present day and in our house this autumn, we’re pickling beets, making onion chutney, freezing berries and beans, adding damsons to gin and putting the potatoes into hessian sacks to see us through the winter. It’s a very modest variation of my Nan’s formidable store, but it makes me feel good when I look at those jars gleaming in the low autumn light.

I’ve nearly finished crocheting myself a transition scarf (you know, the kind of scarf you need when it’s chilly, but not cold enough for the big woollens and happily unpacked all my long-sleeved tops yesterday. My making desk is currently covered in scraps of fabric for lampshades as I’m recovering four sad and beige ones that came with the house, with something more interesting (although someone has put his foot down about dragon shades, which is annoying) and colourful. Luckily, Bede was finished a few weeks ago and, after a long journey North, is now happily united with his new family.

I start needle-felting again later this month after I’ve hit a few deadlines and covered those shades. A sleeping dragon is on the order books and I’m looking forward to picking up the needle again. I have some lovely raw wool from Skye to mix into the blend for this one, gathered from a fence just outside where we stayed earlier this year.

Oh Skye, I do miss ye. The skies, and the mountains and the air and the room to breathe. This will be a lovely little project to bring it all back.

The Autumn Equinox, Mabon, arrives on Sunday 22nd September. Obviously, I’ll be making an apple and blackberry crumble for it, no doubt stewing something delicious for a long time too. I’ll also light a small fire in the burner for the sound and the smell, think about my intentions for the winter. Our wedding anniversary is exactly 2 days later - I love that we got married at that time: the tables were full of hedgerow berries, tiny pumpkins and seed heads.

Right, I have books to return to the library and an allotment to pick berries in. Whatever is filling your life right now, I hope its kind to you.

*the booze kind of fermented, not the kimchi kind

Not really here