Walking in October Rain

There is a rain that doesn’t fall so much as arrive, and October is full of it. It comes sideways off the hill without ever quite committing to being weather. You can’t shelter from it. You can only decide to stop minding.

I went up the lane this morning mostly to be out of the house, which is a legitimate reason and the one behind about eighty per cent of my walking. The hedges have gone over. Blackberries finished — after Michaelmas they belong to the púca anyway, and I am not inclined to test it. Haws thick this year, which the old people would tell you means a hard winter, and which actually means we had a good spring.

The hazels have dropped nearly everything. Squirrels have been through the lot; there were husks on the wall in that scattered, careless way they leave things, like a teenager’s bedroom.

Three things worth writing down:

A heron on the drain by Kelly’s, standing in that way they have of looking like they’re waiting for a bus they know is cancelled.

The smell where the leaves have started going down — that sweet, cidery rot that is one of the four or five smells I would take with me if we were only allowed a few.

And on the way back, the light did the thing it does maybe twice an autumn: came in under the cloud from the west, very low and very gold, and lit the whole wet lane up like something being remembered rather than something happening.

It lasted about ninety seconds. I stood in it and got wetter.

Home, tea, dry socks. A good morning’s work, and not a word written.