First Views from an Autumnal Meadowplace

I woke up in the spare room this morning. A beautifully misty morn nearly compensated for a night of bed swapping. I live in hope that one of us will grow out of this soon!

You just can't see the golden sky. But it was golden! There's one little pear on the one little pear tree out there.

Conkers are starting to fall from the chestnut tree up in the corner. Mattman wants to line his windowsill with them, and Jo is filling a vase.

Same view from my room, when I had re-united myself therewith. Can you see the cows? They were very quiet this morning. Obviously also enjoying the bodings of a fine day.

This is Mattman's new school route. He cuts through the university campus just below us which joins a little lane down to his new school. I drove him to the lane this morning. Heavy bags after a week of new routine are starting to take their toll!

And this is part of my new-ish school route. Next month I will have been a classroom assistant for a whole year.

The view coming home. Where the leafy suburbs open out onto Belfast lough and you bask in the splendour of a genuinely hot and sunny day. I went for a walk to the post box when I got home. I wore my shorts and a summer top. It was a pretty exceptional way to start Autumn!

September

 One of you fine Susan Branch living people shared a picture of her September tree the other day on good old farcebook. But I can't find it now or you now, so here is a teeny tiny one stolen shamelessly from Goggle. The line at the top stood out for me even more than the fabulous words. "Wind gives speech to trees". Here in the frozen North for days now as soon as you go outside you hear Autumn. Up until this year I thought you felt it in the crisper, cleaner air. I thought you saw it in the blue, blue sky whose sun didn't burn. In a little epiphany I realised last week that you hear Autumn: in the dry leaves not yet ready to take their leave (excuse the pun...) of summer.

Appropriately, yesterday morning in church we sang "We have heard a joyful sound" and I did smile broadly when we got to the verse that says, "Give the winds a mighty voice: Jesus saves". I was smiling and hoping that the noise of His Autumn would be heard wherever the leaves fall and that salvation would come for all who most need it. As our very traditional preacher pointed out in a most untraditional way for the frozen North, being the word "saved" has many translations, among them finding peace and well-being.

 I have goals for this month! I told my extremely lovely Science teacher and co-staff room chatter today that I was going to get organised this month. She pointed out that you'd never set that as a goal for a child. "Be specific, Mags," she said. So here are the specifics, in an attempt to create accountability for myself:

I am going to have food in the house every day and that includes remembering that I need a packed lunch too!

I am going to stop forgetting swimming kit and piano lessons.

I am going to crochet my tank top from this book. My version will be in easy, monochrome grey.

I am going to start that 52 books in a year thing that everyone else started in January. So institutionalised are we, in three separate schools now, that September is really the start of our new year!

I will be in bed by eleven instead of midnight. (It's 23:29 now.)

If you're still here you'll want a cup of tea. Camomile at this hour. Thank you all for still popping in to the new Meadowplace x It is lovely to have so many porches to relax on when a moment even vaguely beckons from behind the conker-laden chestnut tree up yonder. I know that you're all finding ways to celebrate the speech of the trees this Autumn!

For Frances

Conker: noun British

• the hard, shiny dark brown nut of a horse chestnut tree.
• (conkers) [treated as singular] a children’s game in which each has a conker on the end of a string and takes turns in trying to break another’s with it.

Origin:

mid 19th century (a dialect word denoting a snail shell, with which the game, or a form of it, was originally played): perhaps from conch, but associated with (and frequently spelled) conquer in the 19th and early 20th cents: an alternative name was conquerors