autumn rushed

Autumn usually catches me in a regretful, but poetic mood. I normally wax lyrical about the colours, the heaps of leaves, the thinning of the canopy. Autumn came as a shock this year, since, having declared autumn just before half-term, we spent a week out of the country, and when we returned the leaves had turned. Instant autumn, and two weeks later, the majority of trees were near bare.

In the week after half-term I visited the custard maple to find that the lower leaves were about half turned to their characteristic yellow, the other half were fading from green still, the colour of spearmint leaves. The thinning crown was scattered with shades of oatmeal. Last week I sped past it blindly, only remembering when it was in the mirror, bare.

Beech and oak still cling, stubbornly, to leaves that are like a thin porridge. Other deciduous trees, like the birch, have gone into their winter sleep with just a few random remainders of their solar factories.

I walked out in the low sun of Sunday morning this week, across the green on a well built hoggin path that, although patchily wet, had not yet decided where the winter's puddles were going to form. The ditches held abandoned branches, pretending to be prehistoric monsters reaching up from the water, and mixed deciduous leaves the colour of dark chestnut. Across the lawn, ridges of collected leaves marked the extent of the streams' spate, now mostly returned between their banks. Drier pools of leaves were like crystalising fudge under their sleeping boughs.