AUTUMN EQUINOX

  ‘Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.’ Albert Camus

Autumn arrives at La Paperie.  It’s a time when the wildlife stock up on berries and nuts for the winter ahead.  Days are mellow, honey and marmalade shades.  Drained by the summer, the leaves are turning red and yellow and orange, breaking down nutrients such as the chlorophyll which they use for photosynthesis. 

Most mornings, I walk alongside the tall stone wall, through the cottage gates, past the rectory, up the hill along Rue de Tieulle lined with lime trees.  Bird song fills the air.  There is a silver-gold cast to the sky now colouring pastel crayon shades on the horizon: grey, pink and orange.  The air is scented with mulch and wood smoke.  I pass the maternelle, towards the church with its high stained-glass windows, recalling the flowers in spring and summer that dotted the lane.  Now the hedge rows are studded with berries which glisten like jewels: elderberries, rowan berries, rosehips and blackberries ‘glossy purple clots’ wrote the poet Seamus Heaney. 

However, today, I am sitting on the sun terrace, watching a flock of starlings rise from the damp grass and swerve in the pale blue sky, wispy with clouds: peach and rose and pearly white.  Swallows twitter in the eaves preparing to make their departure to warmer climes.  Dappled light falls through the boughs of the fruit trees which hang heavy with baubles of red and gold and green apples, purple damsons and speckled pears.   Spiders’ webs are slung along the hedgerow, suspended beneath bushes. Peacock butterflies, painted ladies, swallow tails and red admirals settled on the thistles. I sweep the grasses aside as I walk down the path, past the water pump and lean-to stacked with logs and the wooden shack, to the bottom of the garden, where I look towards the valley where thick mist has collected like clotted cream in a deep green bowl. 

The apples are ready for harvesting.  The Bramley apple tree is my favourite tree in the garden.  I know it intimately: what year it gave the best harvest, when it had powdery mildew, which animals and birds and insects live in its branches.  When Min was a child, it was a place to hide in, climb up, swing from, build a den in and camp under.  We made pies in the kitchen, the scent of apples and sugar and cinnamon mingling and drifting into the salon.  And now, many years later, in my mind’s eye, I see Min and I gathering windfalls, taking care not to get stung as bees buzz lazily, settling on the fruit.  We put the bruised ones on the compost heap.  Next we harvest the rosy-red, green and gold fruit from the lower branches, placing our cupped hands under each apple, gently twisting, so that they come away easily. 

Henry David Thoreau wrote in Wild Fruits ‘The value of these fruits is not in the mere possession or eating them, but in the sight and enjoyment of them.’  As he said, the word fruit comes from the Latin, fructus, meaning, ‘that which is used or enjoyed.’  In the shed we wipe each apple with a cloth and wrap them in royal-blue tissue paper with great care, as if they are bone-china or semi- precious stones.  We store them in wooden crates so they will last us through the long, cold months to come.