Better Late Than Never

Sept 30, 2024

blackberries

Today was beautiful. After spending all September wondering when autumn is coming, with a few cold mornings that felt like it might have arrived, only to shrug off my layers in the afternoon sun, I can truly say that this past week has been autumn. After ten days of no rain, linen shorts and sunlit prevenings, we finally had a downpour on Wednesday (for which our garden was very thankful) and as a result we’ve since had earlier bedtimes, golden trees and amber paths of leaves everywhere.

I went out on Tuesday evening last week, the day before the rain came back, after a day of spending too much time at my laptop. I walked down the lane to check on the chickens, because they were standing on the other side of the fence bawking. Normally they are pretty good at putting themselves to bed, but since the dark has been creeping in a little earlier recently, they seemed a bit confused about how to get back round the fence, and were mostly trying to go through it. Their eyesight is much worse at night, and they need a little help, so I lobbed them over the fence and they happily found their way back to the coop. On my way back down the lane I was escorted by the cats (which made me feel very important), who watched while I picked some flowers, and the early blackberries. By this point, it was night and I only managed to gather a handful, but I don’t think it was really about the blackberries in the first place. One moment I had been annoyed that the chickens were being noisy, distracting me from updating my cv again, and the next I was picking blackberries in the dark with two of my favourite creatures in the world, and a quiet brain. I made two small blackberry oat crumbles later that night, topped with oatly greek oatgurt (which I use in at least half of our meals) and db and I sat together, drinking tea, eating our crumble and feeling very lucky, and a little bit sneaky.

All this to say in my very scattered way, that today was beautiful.

We came home in the early evening in time for the rain to finish and to watch the cows in the field beside us being loaded into a trailer, to spend the wetter, colder seasons inside. I will miss seeing them every day. We decided to take a walk down the lane and into their field. The world felt very still as we wandered through the now empty field, skipping around natural fertiliser and getting our shoes wet and muddy searching for damsons to no avail, as our bovine friends are very fond of them. The sky was blue and clear, the clouds with that beautiful post rain pink hue, and after the rain we’ve had over the past number of days, the ripe blackberries seem to have at least tripled. We are so fortunate that our entire lane and field is lined with brambles, and we filled our hands with just enough. I was reminded of Milly Molly Mandy books, Beatrix Potter’s world, and the first time we ever came to this field to pick berries. Today was beautiful. (aj)