September
Gone are the aromas of hot earth and barbecues, lollipop-coloured clothes, other people’s lives audible through open doors and windows, sunshine warming bare legs, iced drinks sweet and herby.
As Summer tips into Autumn, there’s the scent of apples; hedgerows bejewelled with garnet and obsidian and ruby berries; the skip-whine-trudge of children going to school; bare legs encased; steaming drinks warming and spiced.
Conkers peek through spiky eyelashes from tree and pavement. What were you supposed to do to harden them? Oven? Vinegar? I can’t recall. Did I ever beat anyone? I can’t recall that either.
But I remember the first day of the school year when I was fifteen, far too sophisticated for conkers, walking down the hill to collect my friend, ignoring my mother’s plea to wear a coat. It’s still too warm, Mum, and it’s not going to rain.
I was ready for Autumn. I always was. Tired of the heat – or more often – the disappointment because there was none, tired of a lack of pattern, I was happy when primary colours became muted and freedom became something earned at the end of the day. Albeit briefly, I even looked forward to school.
We walk the mile to school wearing our freshly ironed shirts, knotted ties, dark skirts and jumpers. The uniform is supposed to make us look the same but never can. Short, tall, curvy, uncurvy, maturing at different ages into different shapes, we are ourselves, pushing the rules about skirt lengths and shoe styles and make-up to make uniform individual.
We pass the path to the waterfall, cross over the bridge over the river which will run slow into the bigger one for a few weeks yet and under the narrow gauge railway.
On every deciduous tree around us, the leaves are still green but they whisper in the breeze to each other ‘When shall we change? What will be the tipping point?’
I barely notice, too busy wondering if this year’s set texts in English will be good and what stories I’ll be asked to write and thinking as I’ve thought before:
Surely this year at last, school will be fun, the teachers will be inspiring, the bullies will have lost interest, and the boy will finally see me properly and fall in love…
October
By October, leaves are red and gold and orange.
My wedding day was in October. All the days leading up to it had been grey and drizzly. Early in the morning of that day, I heard a pattering on the roof. No one had planned for rain.
My father, the tee-total, brings me a Bucks-Fizz, saying ‘Rain before seven, fine by eleven’ to help me stop worrying about what will happen if it doesn’t stop.
Then we’re caught up in a flurry. I’m too busy with hair and make-up and unfamiliar hooped petticoats to notice what is happening outside. When my mother and sister have gone ahead, Dad and I wait with nothing to say, because what can be said? I am doing something irrevocable – going from single to married, from daughter to wife. I’m aware of myself teetering on the edge of change, while my father is muttering the words he will shortly need to say.
Who giveth this woman?
Her mother and I do.
I hadn’t lived with my parents for ten years by then and I was never my father’s chattel anyway, and he never thought I was. But I was his beloved, stepping into a new stage of life.
Once he’d held my hand as I learned to walk, and later held the bicycle steady as I learned to ride and then… both times, he’d let go to see how I managed alone. Now, as I teetered, he was trusting once more that once he let go, I’d keep my balance.
And then the car arrives to take us to the church and Dad and I walk towards the entrance, late guests scurrying past.
Arm in arm for the last yards we pause and look up.
Above us in the churchyard, trees bow heads crowned with golden leaves, and above those leaves is a canopy of the deepest, clearest, most beautiful azure sky.
I am ready.
November
November is sometimes a drowning month when wind drives the last leaves from every tree to skitter angrily across grey skies before rain drums them into the mud.
Even if it doesn’t rain, the skies are dull, the night encroaching on day at either side, crushing it slowly hour by hour towards Solstice. Frosts start, snow may fall.
For a day or so, fireworks stud the grey night, rockets going up, up, up and balancing in the darkness before… Hoom! They fall in showers of impossible brightness. Bonfires scent our hair and clothes with woodsmoke. Our hands are warmed by hot dogs and steaming chocolate, before waving sparklers in defiance against the black night.
I remember a firework display when my children were very small. My baby daughter puts hands over her ears and buries her nose in my shoulder, sobbing. It’s too overwhelming for her. Not for my toddler son who tries to out-jump and out-shriek the fireworks then… losing both wellies in the mud, steps forward in his socks and…then falls flat. Just as well the noise blots out what my husband is saying as he picks that muddy figure up.
When the fireworks are over, November becomes dull again until Christmas fills the town with lights and gifts and sparkle.
In the countryside, a few brown leaves cling moistureless for a few more days, then fall to crunch under feet before turning into earth at the foot of their tree.
In three months, they’ve gone from green to … dead?
Maybe not exactly. Because they’ve fallen, mushrooms can grow. Under them animals seek food or store it. A hidden world is revealed by bare branches: the last of the berries, bark, fungus, hedgehogs, deer, rabbits, squirrels, and the curious, mischievous fox – russet, red, fawn, silver, orange.
Those Autumn leaves have transformed, every one holding a memory of eons of leaves that once emerged green then turned gold then faded so something else could grow and live. Another tree, a fungus, a creature.
Everything fades but nothing ever truly disappears. It changes. It feeds. It makes something new possible.
Everything is a matter of timing and balance.
Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).
