Walking the Line

Notes from September | Red & Green | Subversive Gratitude

It was as if a switch flipped, that first day of September, the day summer ended. Clouds began to gather, the air changed, and the light notched down to grey-green, as if all was submerged beneath water. I foretold the change in air in my previous post, but I never thought the summer would dip out so soon. The showers of rain came, bouncing hard and white off every surface. The gutter dripped. Rooks chattered in the trees above us, and I looked up to watch them crossing the sky above our heads, their muscular collapse of wings carrying them fast across a dove-grey sky.

I forget each year that I must undergo The Transition. From summer into winter, from light into darkness, from hope into gloom. I wrote about this last year, and I am sure to write about it next year, but there is something about the newness of dark shadows that catches me unawares each year. The recurrent sense that I am walking a precarious line.

It helps that our house is orientated like a compass. It faces due south, and the rear windows look north towards the village, where strong southern light illuminates the church and far emerald hills. My office and our bedroom face east, the space of mornings. The bathroom and kitchen have windows and rooflights which gather up the western afternoon and evening light. There is a moment in the year, well two moments, as we near the spring or vernal Equinox, when the evening sun is at the perfect angle to stream through our opaque bathroom window. At a certain time in the early evening, sun rays skim our neighbours’ roof and stream through the ragged branches of the old apple tree, painting onto the window a fuzzy fawn-grey simulacrum of the scene outside. One evening in a brief break from the gloom, I looked out and caught a glimmer of movement, the shadow puppet of a small bird. I saw the blurry grey outline of his beak, his legs, his smooth back, his keep-up-rightness. Life (and light) at the pivot-point, poised, balanced.

Mornings began cool and dark before the light mustered, subdued and the palest blue beyond the blinds, with none of the rousing clamour of the summer’s morning light. Darkness edged nearer at the beginning, and end, of our days. There was thunder one day and I walked up to the moor, skirting the luminous edge of the blackest sheet of cloud.

I began the subversive gratitude practice led by Jeannine Ouellette of Writing in the Dark and my journal this month was peppered with reluctant gratitude for the less pleasant and joyful moments of my days. I wrote that I was grateful for getting caught in the downpour at the end of the previous day, for a long while walking the line between vast open blue sky and towering clouds, black-bellied, with wraith-like sheets of rain wafting towards me. I was grateful that with only twelve days of rain, the dry-ness that dusted those long summer days was long gone. Everywhere seemed to spring leaks: the start-of-semester staff conference was hampered by a leak in the adjoining theatre, there was a mysterious and unfathomable leak in my neighbour’s house, and one in her new partner’s roof. We tramped damp grit and fallen leaves into the house.

There was one long productive Sunday, when a front of heavy rain passed through all day. It cleared at half six and the low meagre gold sun forced itself in stark angles at the end of roads, into alleyways, upon church tower clock faces. We walked up to the luminous field, its air still and fresh from the rain, the green rising to a wall of black cloud at the very top. It produced a startling effect, a flipped picture in which the sky provided the undertones and the hedgerows and hawthorn berries provided the source of light.

September was the month of red and green, in the striped skins of the apples plucked fat from our tree, in the deep fuscia and lobelia flowers against the green quarry face, in the blood-drops of hawthorn berries against a charcoal sky. We filled our kitchen table with apples that we peel and core, chop and steam, and bag for the freezer. Weeks and weeks’ worth of packaged fruit sunshine to see me through the winter.

I was grateful for September sunshine coming after three weeks of heaped clouds, close mizzle and cold gusty breezes. I was grateful for black mornings. I was grateful for the cold. I was grateful for old friends who know me and my family and our shared history. I was grateful for a warm bed and heating at a flick of a switch and for clever people who understand philosophy. I was grateful for baby-blue skies and low brutal sunlight that cast long shadows into the edges of my vision.

I was grateful for the headache that greeted me as I woke. For the chill morning blue and the warm evening gold. For the jackdaws that foraged on the road. For the collegiality of people, doing their best for the university, our city, the students. For the spider’s web wedged in the doorway of the workshop, which each morning was laced with shining silver dew-drops like a bag chandelier strung with crystals, sagging under its own opulence. For the jovial sight of Hedge’s (our resident hedgehog who visits every evening) backside trotting across the deck towards the yew tree. And for those three pristine flowers that rose unexpected from my hosta on the porch, a white shock out of time.

I was grateful that we hurtled towards October. I was grateful for this gentle segue into winter. I was (and always will be) grateful for rudbeckias, which beamed their yellow luminosity across our garden, lighting my path as I walked the eternal line between light and dark.

Red apples and green pears from our tree

The Equinox shadow play

The last days of September, above the village