Walking

 

Autumn Equinox. Apparently. Yesterday the phrase kept being spouted on the radio, on the television and smiling journalists seemed to think it was laden with special meaning for everyone. Magical. Mystical. A mystery, certainly, why they kept repeating it over and over.

I’ve felt the light lowering and clawing back its golds and ambers to throw somewhere else needing warmth and hope. As it pulls back, the elements around me seem to be reaching for just one more moment of comfort; the bricks in the garden walls glow and mottled charcoal shadows of leaves and branches paint themselves on the mosaic canvas of reds, browns and creams.

A ring-collar dove lands with a flap and a flutter and dances along the top of this terracotta stage. A little fawn two-note Fred Astaire with his eye on the acid-red berries of the rowan tree that is showing off its fruit in the early morning glow. Will Fred never learn a third note?

I’m standing still, locked down by the stillness of the air. No sway of bamboo or shudder of silver birch leaves, but the light is constantly floating, shimmering. I’m fascinated by the colours and how they can be changing, fluctuating, even as my eyes struggle to focus on them. The russets in the bricks, the nutmeg bark, the last burst of pinks, purples and yellows from stubborn and magnificent chrysanthemums, begonias and marigolds. One last final push before the big sleep.

And then my eyes are dazzled by the sudden illumination of stained-glass diamonds and circles of steely turquoise, lavender-sage greens and primrose yellows... there are no fixed colours and the glass seems to play with the light, enjoying the promising tickle of new tints and glows.

And then the sky, bright and demanding. Clear and translucent like a sheet of blue glass spread across the chapel rooftop and the trees in the distance over my shoulder. The turmeric yellow of a neighbour’s acacia tree splashes across the sky, it seems to be laughing at its stubborn determination to fight the blue.

I can hear a faint buzz, a faint twang in the air. Between our house and the chapel, a telephone wire vibrates, buzzing like a plucked guitar string. A small group of starlings are gathered, huddled together along the wire, bouncing with their tapping and clucking. Sending out a Morse code, perhaps. ‘Come on you lot, it’s time to go.’

Which direction will they fly? Into the blue – no, that heads north to the cold. Surely, they’ll head into the green white of the light behind me, closer to the silvery sun and the promise of warmth somewhere else...

 Colin Stevens