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Kindle Notes & Highlights
In its brightness, its startling quality, its beauty and its inevitable slide to darkness, it is the season that most resembles human life. The first moment you can remember kicking up leaves is probably fairly contiguous with your first apprehension of death. All humans are in the autumn of their days – that’s life, and the other.
Then suddenly the swallows have gone. The air is quieter for their departure, but other, more measured voices fill the spaces: robins singing quiet laments of farewell and longing, separation and loss.
As November beckons, the days turn colder and the first frosts glitter in the ever paler morning sunlight, highlighting every strand of spider’s silk hung from the brittle stalks of hogweed. Sloes are reaching their prime, the icy mornings sweetening them.
To one who loves the hills at every season, the blossoming is not the best of the heather. The best of it is simply its being there – is the feel of it under the feet. To feel heather under the feet after long abstinence is one of the dearest joys I know.
