Autumn

As a child, we always went on family walks looking for conkers to play the game; conkers. Sometimes the conkers would still be in their shell and they’d have to be broken open to get to them.  I remembered one year a conker, still in its shell, fell from the tree above and hit me on the top of my head!  

I remember the leaves on the ground and the sound they made when I walked through them. Even now, when there’s a lot of leaves on the ground, I make a point of walking through them and it magically transports me back to my childhood, and the thought of those memories always makes me smile.

I remember the cool crisp autumn air first thing in the morning and wrapping up warm with jumpers, coats, hats, scarves and gloves.  A long way from the previous few months when I had been running around in shorts and t-shirts barefoot!  

These days, autumn tends to be a bit different. I now live in one of the wettest places in the UK, so when autumn comes around, the leaves don’t always go through the beautiful colour changes and we tend to need our waterproofs and brollies to stay dry, more than needing layers to keep warm.

I also struggle with the shorter days and having less sunlight because we get so much more rain than where I lived as a child.  The skies here are more varying shades of grey at this time of year.  Not as pretty by a long shot, as they just make the days dull.

Over the last few years, I’ve tried to embrace autumn more and make my peace with the autumns I now experience.  It has taken a while but I think I’m getting there.  I look for the beautiful dry, crisp air, sunny days and drink them in as much as possible, because it could always rain tomorrow, or even later that very day.  

This year, the trees seem to have put on a beautiful show of changing colours, or maybe because of the tough year it's been I could just be noticing them more. Either way, I've noticed them and appreciated them all the more this year. Some mornings we've been treated to the most beautiful sunrises and some evenings have breathtaking sunsets.

I know that seeing all the leaves putting on a beautiful display this year had really helped to lift my mood and to ease into the upcoming winter months especially as here in the UK we are currently in Lockdown 2.0. It's almost as if Mother Nature knew we would need to see the beauty of autumn in between lockdowns.