Mostly Autumn

Just like Jeff Wayne’s nameless departed lover, I get a real buzz from kicking my way through autumn’s golden gown. I most definitely love this time of year. There is no way that any fallen leaves in my path would ever go undisturbed.

The sudden sharp downturn in the temperature, the early dusks, the primal thrills of Halloween and bonfires – this is by far my favourite season. But apart from clogging up gutters and drains with its wet and rotting leaves, what’s the point of autumn really? When you look closely the other seasons have a definite place in nature. Autumn? Well it just sort of fills the windy gap between the heady delights of summer and the semi-hibernation of winter doesn’t it?

I mean, spring is really useful, I get the point of it. It’s the season of new birth. I can pretty much guarantee that if you were asked to think of an image to sum up spring then you’d conjure up a picture of new lambs happily bouncing about in a hilly green field. They’d almost certainly be gambolling. Has any other creature ever gambolled? It’s like the two words – ‘gambolling’ and ‘lamb’ – are joined at the hip, like ‘lying’ and ‘politician’.

The winter season is a time of cleansing, of killing off the weak and old to make way for all that new growth in springtime. That’s perhaps not such a good thing in nursing homes but really useful in our fields and woodlands. When the trees are stripped bare of their leaves they let the light in to the forest floor where all the nasty creepy creatures that we don’t like to think about can do the kind of work that we want to picture even less – most of it involving chomping on something that’s decaying. It might not be pretty but don’t knock it. We all have to earn a living somehow.

Summer is a celebration, a time for growth and fattening up of all things before the harvest to come at its end. Assuming that summer hasn’t been rained off (and that’s a big assumption) then crops grow tall, people north of Watford try to work out just what the heck to do with Pimms and I try my best to dodge salads for the two weeks or so that we see the sun in England. Summer’s fine, I understand summer.

But autumn? I can’t see where autumn fits into this cycle so neatly. Spring is birth, summer is growth, winter is death. It’s all nice and neat.

I have a theory though. Perhaps autumn’s just there for me to go out and enjoy? Maybe it’s sole purpose is to let us have fun in nature’s playground when it’s not too hot, not too cold and not too crowded. And you know what? That’s good enough for me.

Thanks, autumn.

© Shaun Finnie 2012