Time seems to be flying by. Too quickly.
It seems like only yesterday that we were moving in here to start our new(est) life in the Allier Spring. But suddenly, in the blink of a dream-blind eye, Summer has slipped away, and Autumn is falling all around.
I have recently returned from a visit with my offspring to my sister’s house in the Hot Dry South, and Simon is now in Montreal, visiting his daughter, and being a Country Mouse in a Very Big City. It’s surprising how much can change in the the course of only a week away.
When I got home, the chubby puppies had grown into Little Dogs, beginning to take on the gangly aspect of adolescence, and learning to walk to heel on their leads. The kittens had become capable walkers, pouncers, climbers, hard-food eaters, and litter-tray users, and had somehow become omnipresent and very in-your-face (or rather, up-your-leg). And the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness has crept in through the back door, to carpet the ground with deep pile peaches and avalanched acorns.
In Simon’s absence, with all the animal chores to myself, I am finding the days shorter than even the later-rising, earlier-setting sun conspires to make them. And I simply can’t keep up with the peaches! The freezer is bursting with bags of peeled and stoned halves of them. The fridge is full of stewed kilos of them. And all the empty jars I could find are glinting golden on the sunlit shelves, heavy with their sweet, fragrant and a bit-too-runny jam.
And still the peaches fall. Like juicy, fat tears, thudding muffled into the dew-soaked grass, wet with summer-end sadness.
The days are still sunny, and warm with the memories of summer. Sitting lazily in the long grass to watch the llamas graze in the shade of the big oaks, and the puppies frolic in the nearly-dry stream bed, I still get bitten by insects, enjoying a final feasting frenzy before the decimating onslaught of winter chill. Grasshoppers still chirrup scratchily in the black-berried hedgerows, and gatherings of Great Tits still ring their three-syllable variations on their Spring-Is-Here theme.
But the swallows have gone, the lizards are sleeping, and the cool night air is silent, but for the soothing hoot of a lonesome owl. Each day the sun has to try a little harder to furrow its way through the morning mist that blankets the fields, and blurs the trees into smudgy loomings of grey, drowning softly in the ever nearer distance.
Autumn has Fallen. And its tender beauty softens my heart, like Forgiveness.
