in autumn

I ran into an old friend in the street the other day and she described to me the chaos of her child-filled home. The noise and the mess and the demands and the overwhelm. As she spoke I could visualise the picture she was painting as though it were in our house; the dirty plates stacked up by the sink, the clutter over every surface, the voices and music competing to be heard, the urgent, endless shopping lists, the driving rosters and the laundry piles. I listened to her and I felt her words in my body.

But then something shifted and it occurred to me that although I had lived the full house life my friend was describing for so many years, in actual fact my season had changed without me really stopping to take notice, and my reality now is something completely new.

It’s almost like when you immerse yourself wholeheartedly in a season of life it feels like it’ll last forever, and when the new season comes along sometimes it takes you a moment to realise and to process what that means and then to make peace with it.

In our new season Indi is living with friends in Melbourne, Jarrah is overseas for the year, and Bren and I only have one child living at home with us. Our one child at home, Pepper, is 14, pretty self sufficient, at times ridiculously chatty and sociable and at other times definitely not. There are no competing voices, no communal space mess, no fighting, no late night sister chats in the bathroom, or bedrooms, no guitar duets, no sung harmonies. It’s often really quiet.

Although I obviously knew this was our situation, Jarrah left for overseas three months ago after all, I don’t think I really processed it until this week. Maybe it’s normal to take a few months to fully arrive into such a new environment, maybe I’ve been protecting my heart, or maybe I’m just a bit slow. I don’t know. I do miss the everyday of living with my big girls, but I also absolutely adore watching them spreading their wings and experiencing life as adults. I love missing them. I love catching up with them, hearing their happy news and workshopping their issues, celebrating their wins and nursing their broken hearts. We talk about them all the time, and pore over every detail of the photos they send. Our family group chat crosses time zones and sleep cycles, and spans everything from Kardashian gossip, to Middle East peace processes, to outfit decisions, to relationship advice, to budgeting queries, to selfies, all within the space of an hour.

It’s probably really cliched to compare our new living situation seasonal shift to the season of autumn we find ourselves in, but scrolling through these photos I can’t help myself. Autumn is a time when we recognise the impermanence of life. It is a time of change, of maturity, a time when we reap the fruits of our labour. It is a time of productivity but also completion.

These past few days I’ve tried really hard to live in the moment and savour the feeling of being deep in this autumnal space. The days have been brilliantly sunny but crispy cold. We’ve been wearing so many layers in the morning and gradually stripping them off as midday approaches, only to wander around looking for where we’ve discarded them and putting them all back on again in the late afternoon. The daylight hours are getting shorter and shorter.

We’re lighting fires for warmth and to clean up our prunings. We’re harvesting the last of the flowers, the fruit, the nuts and the veggies and we’re appreciating the maturity and abundance of the bounty. We’re preserving what we can for winter. We’re cooking hearty soups.

We’re digging up the summer crops, forking the beds, adding compost, and replanting them with beetroot, garlic, leeks, spinach and silverbeet.

And today, after the first proper frost of the season overnight, we are observing the decay, the rot, the impermanence, the end of the season.

We’ve still got more beds to flip and some to tarp, we’ve got the dahlias to dig up and store, and seeds to save, we’ve got trees to prune and more fences to mend, we’ve got blackberry and gorse to slash and animals to care for.

And in amongst all of those end of autumn jobs, we have the growing season to contemplate and evaluate.

It feels like a quiet introverted time

It feels like a good time to start thinking about some new projects to take us through winter.

It feel like I might need to invest in a new winter coat this year.

How are you feeling about where you are? Does the season you’re in match the season you feel?

I hope you have a beautiful weekend, friends.

Sending lots of love to you,

Kate x