Learning to cope with all the vicissitudes of Autumn

Country Living with Francis Farragher

We’re into the fading hours of September and although it was quite a benign month (well up until this week at least) with higher-than-average temperatures and not too much by way of rainfall, it always seems to leave a mark in terms of the transition from the season of light into the impending gloom of winter.

True, the swallows haven’t started to gather on the wires yet – probably delaying their journey south because of our warmer spell of weather during the first three weeks of the month – but they’ll too be soon ‘packing their bags’ before their epic flights to South Africa to enjoy a second Summer in the one year.

The ‘visitors’ have speckled parts of my sheds with their trademark droppings, but for all that, they are the most welcome of visitors each Spring, and their aerial manoeuvres through the summer months have been a wondrous sight.

The talk over a pint of plain in the local watering holes has been of the evenings closing in and certain little practicalities must be faced up to, like finding and recharging the torches, while tractor lights seem to mysteriously curl up and die when not in use during the season of sun.

Autumn, or The Fall as it’s known in America, has always seemed to inspire poets and scribes to come up with a mix of melancholia and creativity, that has left its mark on writing down through the centuries.

The English romantic poets like John Keats, who himself departed this world after just 25 autumns, famously wrote of the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom friend of the maturing sun; conspiring with him how to load and bless, with fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run’.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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