I feel them first. I always do, for that is how they introduce themselves – timidly. Perhaps I’ll be sitting there in my pyjamas, drinking a cup of tea, when one of them gently creeps in through a window left slightly ajar, an old habit that lingers on from summer which, at this point, I haven’t come to fully accept has left us. In it will come, and the lightest of cool touches will wander across the top of my slippered foot, causing me to snap out of a book, making me think of that open window again, and prompting me to finally get up and close it. Or maybe I’ll be out for a walk, enjoying the feel of late-year sun on my skin, when a breeze will rear up from nowhere and lance down my open collar before I can react, causing that instinctive reaching for the collar and skywards glimpse that recognises an imminent swing in the seasons.
Autumn, with its sepia tones, is a natural reflection point in the year’s cycle, but I find this to be even more the case when the autumn winds start to blow. Why this should be I don’t know, but surely it must hark back to some primal urge that sees us leaning toward the comforts of home when the seasons become harsher. In prehistoric times, the flickering, firelit entrance to the cave must have been a welcoming sight when the hunting, gathering and wandering of the warmer months drew to a close, just as the soft light diffused by the curtains through the windows of home now speak of a good meal, a hot bath and a warm bed at the end of a long working day. Such simple longings are, I think, best expressed in simple terms, none more haunting and beautiful than the anonymous courtier of King Henry VIII who wrote:
Westron wynde when wyll thow blow
the small rayne down can Rayne
Cryst yf my love were in my Armys
and I yn my bed Agayne.
Now that we are further advanced into autumn, those tentative early breezes have found their confidence and have become more insistent. In the evenings, as they do every year, they buffet the house, discover that any weak points have been sealed, mended, filled and painted, and so kick around petulantly in the garden to cause what mayhem they may – tipping over plant pots, moving garden chairs and shaking the leaves from our cotoneaster tree as they create a racket by batting the wind chimes around. I imagine the world out there in the dark beyond our garden, and wonder how I will find it when next I go to explore it. I know that the swell off the sea will be kicking up and throwing a crashing surf onto the beaches, totally reshaping my favourite fishing spots, and I have no doubt that there will be trees down and debris piled across a number of my favourite walking spots too. There’s no point in worrying about these things or even spending too much thought about them. The winds can blow all they want, so let them. I trust the bricks and the mortar to hold firm as they beat against the house; I trust that the world will right itself after the storm in the way it always does.
As I lay here now, listening to the gravelly scattering of rain that’s being hurled against the window, I naturally turn to think too about the storms in life. It’s never been plain sailing, it hardly ever is, and much of this has been of my own making. But just as the winds of life, like the winds of autumn, may buffet, batter and blow, what’s here around me is solid, none of it more so than Rachel. Steadfast, loyal, a rock in the harshest of whatever the world and its weathers have to offer, as long as I’m here with her “in my Armys and I yn my bed Agayne”, I know that things are going to be alright.
