September is a full month

September is such a full month, it holds summer flowers and autumn berries and winter leaves.  Everywhere you look there is a feast waiting to be tasted, a full palette of colour, and change rippling through the trees like the wash left behind by summer’s boat.  The horse chestnuts are first to succumb to the pull of Fall, brown crinkling and crumpling the leaves while the conkers tumble smooth and glossy.  But others too have a light carpet of yellow and brown although above the trees look green and growing, just a few yellow leaves that give the game away like the first few grey hairs.  If you gather up the leaves when they are brown and dried and smell them, they have a spicy, earthy scent that is so evocative of childhood autumns it triggers memories that clothe me.

Some trees are not so subtle.  Most maples have a blush of pink dusting and diluting their green but one that I pass each morning is deep-sea green everywhere save for a triangle of pure fire at the top like a cone of magma held by the cool earth.  And round the corner the extravagance of a Virginia creeper demands you stop and opens up your cool, tipping in a shared delight that drips in rich red.

There are berries everywhere, red hawthorn and rowan, pyracantha and holly though the holly feels wrong like a Christmas card sent too early.  There are blackberries and elderberries and blue-blushed sloe.  There are downy seeds and spiky seeds and burnt orange sceptres left behind.  And there are spiders curtaining bushes and paths and cars with their webs, dream-catchers for autumn.

Sometimes we need dream-catchers when the mellow of the sun cannot warm the cold mornings and evenings, when the night creeps on, when the wind comes to unsettle and change is in the air.  This is part of the pattern, our dance with the dark, our awareness turning from the sky to the soil, to deep things, to earth.  But this year I have a parable to remember when I feel bare and cannot see fruit in my life.  The trees are not lying dormant through winter.  When the sap withdraws from the leaves it takes all its goodness to the roots, secretly strengthening them ready for new growth in the spring.