the season of decay
So it seems that last week when I wrote my in autumn blog post I was seeing things through a particularly romantic lens. The air was crisp, the leaves on the trees were turning golden, and although the produce was definitely slowing down, we could still pick enough to fill our baskets, bowls and vases each time we ventured out there.
My haven’t things changed in only a few days.
Today, after a week of on and off rain, a couple of frosts, icy cold temperatures, and hardly any sunlight, the picture looks a little different. It’s almost like a completely alternate season to the one I experienced and described last week. It feels damp and colourless and full of decay.
This past week the annual plants have been burnt black and brown by the frosts, the fruit that remains on the vines is swollen and split, often bird eaten and smells so strongly that I find myself holding my breath as I pass on by. The rows that were a riot of colour and petals and magnificent intricate designs, are now dull and monochromatic. The flowers that remain are waterlogged, misshapen. rotting lumps of mush.
If I were to ask Bren how he was feeling about this new season of rot, stench and decay we have entered, I know that he’d have something optimistic and profound to say about how crucial each stage in the cycle of life is, and how much he admires the way nature recycles its nutrients by breaking down last season’s growth into compost, which in turn will be used to add nutrients to the soil and feed the future season’s growth.
On an intellectual level of course I know this to be true, but on an emotional level the world has felt pretty bleak to me this week.
All week I dealt with death and decomposition. I filled wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow up with frost charred plants, putrid fruit and slimy masses of vines that fell apart in my hands. I cut limbs with snippers, I yanked roots out of the ground and I gathered handfuls of fruit that had until recently shown so much promise but were now spoiled beyond salvage. It was stinky, sweaty work, my fingers were blackened and my boots were soaked through to my socks.
All through summer and early autumn as the plants had grown taller and stronger and been laden down with heavy fruit, we had banged stakes into the ground, and cut up old tee-shirts to use as ties to support them and hold them upright. All this week I pulled up those stakes and made piles of the cut ties at the ends of the rows. Where summer and early autumn had felt full of promise of delicious and beautiful things to come, this week I felt like I was working backwards. The fun times were over. The clean up is all that’s left.
As I worked, I tried my best to be grateful for the season that was. To think about how moving the cucumbers up to a patch that got so many more hours of daylight had made such a difference to their growth. To remember how we had such a glut of zucchinis at one stage that we’d snuck them into everything we’d cooked. The basketfuls of peas, the handfuls of beans, the mouthfuls of berries. The salads! The stir-fries! And the flowers! I think it was probably one of our best flower seasons yet.
But in amongst all that deterioration and decline, I found it hard to stay positive. It was a week of serious contemplation and solemn thoughts. It was a week of dark stormy clouds and heaviness. I worried over my regrets of the season, I thought a lot about endings, I agonised over expectations on me and by me, and I almost drowned under my mental load. I felt anxious and impatient and stressed and sad. Just like the loads of organic matter piled onto the compost, it felt like a breaking down of sorts.
It ‘s probably the death of the season of delicious and gorgeous that caused my state of mind, but it might also be the lack of sunlight, it might be this particularly bad patch of insomnia, it might be pms or peri, it might be even be the phase of the moon, or perhaps a combination of all of the above. But I’m okay. This too is a season and maybe I just have to immerse myself in it for a while before it passes and I rebuild and regrow. Hopefully there’s something beautiful waiting to germinate in the next season.
In the meantime I think I’m going to buy some yarn to knit something cozy, I’m going to light some beeswax candles to keep the house smelling sweet, I’m going to cut up some apples to make compot or crumble, and then tonight we’re going to snuggle up on the couch and start the new season of The Wilds. There are definitely some good things about dark days.
Anyway, how have you been feeling about the season you’re sitting in? What are some of the things you like to do while away the time until the sun comes out again?
Or if you’re somewhere sunny right now, tell us what it’s like there? Are the bulbs pushing through the ground? Are you planting all the things? Are you opening the windows to let the fresh air in?
I’ll see you next week dear friends.
Love, Kate x
