It is September. I am wearing a long, black velvet dress and twirling in a misty field. My husband—he was a September baby and today is his birthday—stands beside me in his dinner jacket. I adjust his bow tie and he laughs. Behind us, a sweep of wooded hillsides and at the bottom of the valley, a solitary cottage. We are celebrating the end of summer—harvest time—with friends at a country ball. I have worn a velvet gown before: in a Bath ballroom, a Venice opera house, a London theatre… but nothing has delighted me more than this juxtaposition of fancy frock and foggy field. I tiptoe across the farmyard in my high heels and lean on his arm as we walk towards the cow barn that has been transformed into a ballroom for the night. It’s the first time since the pandemic that we have gathered for this particular event, and I am giddy. The valley is lush and gleaming in the dusk, the barn twinkles with lights, and I’m with some of my favourite people in the world: it is a perfect September night.
At first, September arrived without me noticing. The weather was too hot—not the sweet warmth of late summer, but the strange ferocity of a climate under pressure. Weeks passed, scattered and unsettled—I found it hard to concentrate and couldn’t discover the way back into my work. Everything felt poised, waiting for the seasons to turn. When the weather finally broke and the damp air touched my cheek like a caress, I picked up a pencil and opened my notebook. Outside my loft-room window, pink-tinted clouds drifted and the huge beech tree opposite was dusted with gold.
On the autumn equinox, I swam in the sea with my best friend. It was one of those rare days when air and water are the same temperature— balanced, equal—like the hours of light and dark. I felt the shock of cold as waves washed over my head, and as I emerged I shook salt from my eyes. Later, I went back for a second dip with my middle boy— floating as he surfed. My smallest swam too, following a shoal of tiny fish underwater through a rock-pool tunnel. In the evening, we cooked supper together over a fire, sparks dancing into the sky. The smallest collected pinecones, watching them crackle and burn. ‘When did you first come here?’ he asked me. ‘When I was eighteen’, I replied: twenty five years of this garden, of that beach. Neither my first equinox here, nor—I hope—my last.
An equinox is always a pause, a still place, a reckoning. In the book I am reading— Cacophony of Bone by
— there is a list of Things To Carry into the Darker Part of the Year. It includes the sea (the sea, the sea), as well as the moon, books, feathers… I will carry all of these, but also rising sparks, fat pinecones, tiny fish, a ballgown in a misty field.What will you carry with you into the darker part of the year?
Here’s what I’ve been reading and loving this month: