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Today is grey and overcast in England’s Northern Lake District. After weeks of intense heat and scorched earth, the clearer, cooler air feels like a gift. The hills have softened. The fields seem to be breathing again. In hedgerows the berries are beginning to colour, and I find my thoughts turning towards autumn: mist rising from the valleys, Martindale’s bracken taking on its copper glow, the first leaves loosening their hold on the trees. The year is beginning to change its mind about summer. I welcome it.
There is something in autumn’s willingness to let go that has been speaking to me since my mother died two whirlwind weeks ago. A tree does not cling to every leaf simply because it has loved the summer. It releases what has served its season, and makes room for whatever comes next. Nature seems to possess an instinct for surrender that we humans spend much of our lives learning. Like mine, my mother’s life had its own seasons, each one asking something different of her. At 90, she came to the threshold of another kind of letting go. Being beside her brought me close to the mystery of it, to a deep sense of rightness in allowing a life to complete its own season, to thankfulness for the memory of her suntanned, windblown smile on our happy Mediterranean cruise together – and innumerable other remembrances.
Perhaps this is part of what autumn offers us each year: a quiet invitation both to remember, and to loosen our grip. There are possessions, habits, and ambitions to put down, each having served its time and purpose. There are things to receive, too: cooler mornings, darker evenings, the extraordinary colours of decay, the pleasure of walking beneath trees whose leaves are already preparing to fall. I want to meet this autumn awake to all of it. To appreciate it. To release what has finished. To make room, willingly, for the seasons and the bestirring that are coming. Morning mist rising – gradually sharpening into focused human detail.
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