Bog Myrtle & Peat

You’ll have seen the daylight fading?

And you’ll know that dawn has become a workday normality; that night falls when you’ve hardly made sense of your evening?

Autumn is a fair time to walk in the darkening hills and think of all that sunlight you pissed up the wall in June and July. Remember how angry it made you when, as a child, you were sent to bed on summer nights when it was broad daylight outside? Remember how you railed at the loss of that time, swearing to yourself that if you could only grow up, you’d never waste the possibilities of sunshine?

And does it not bother you to break that promise every summer now you’re grown? When did you start to care that it’s time for bed; that you’ve work in the morning and deadlines to meet? By Christ, you’re lucky that boy can’t see you now – now you’ve haltered yourself in a stall.

So if you’ve clocked this downward trend, perhaps you’ll take solace from a few autumn days which come stitched together in a semblance of stability. Perhaps you’ll find the season that you hoped for in a week of fine weather; matching days for golden leaves and the din of a stag in the gairies. Having failed to grab your childhood summer, grab this now because it’s all you’re getting. Before you know it, a wind’ll swing (as winds can swing) to bring rain or a sense of dullness. You’ll wake to find it’s dark for an hour longer in the morning, and comforting yourself, you’ll say “it’s just the weather – Autumn can’t have vanished overnight”.

And you’re almost right, because chances are that fair weather will return in a day or two. The light’ll widen slightly, and it’ll feel like a recovery. But there is no coming back from that first impact, and when rain drives in for a second or a third time, you’ll begin to see the shortfalls plainly. And so with every descending step into winter, each setback of darkness or fog will be restored with something fainter; each rally will reveal some fresh absence until, in a mass of low cloud and heaviness, you’re unable to recall the last fine day. And you’ll say

this must be how it feels to grow old