"Autumn grows, Autumn in everything." ***

 

A week or two ago these runnels of leaves, like arboreal snakes,
crept everywhere. ....

...but a week later, such discipline was
impossible

Autumn has been encroaching surreptitiously for several weeks now but suddenly, vividly, it is here in technicolour fashion!! Summer’s wave goodbye has arrived with Winter’s hello to cold mornings outside and warmth in snug evenings indoors. I have just happened upon a slim volume, Thoreau on Man and Nature,
in a bookcase as I continue to look for clothes, books, furniture to give away before I leave. Thoreau is irresistible, a common feature among great writers! I quote a short extract:

“October is the month for painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes around the world. As fruit and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year nears its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight. “

Some early mornings I cannot see the Belfort or even
the Poorters Loge, 
normally, almost within reach of my windows!

A perfect description of the heaps of vivid leaves, before dampness overtakes them, scattered across the parks and walkways of Bruges and catching my eye and feet each time I wander along canal-side pathways beneath trees half-stripped of their finery, displaying their skeletal branches. BUT, as well as technicolour finery, there is a certain melancholy about autumn too; the smoky, misty, moisty vistas which give an added mystery to those same early morning walks alongside the canals of Brugge. Seen through a veil of haze, these slightly claustrophobic mornings call up for some, memories of Bruges la Morte, Rodenbach’s mournful novel which somehow delineates the special quiet, nebulous, concealed nature of this particular season [and of this particular town!]. November early walks have a suggestion of the unrevealed, despite the landscape’s familiarity and accessibility. Bruges is beautiful in all the seasons but the tentative incursion of light on a grey, foggy morning brings a half-visible reality gradually to form in a silent, shrouded almost unfamiliar revelation and this is Special! And the silence! Oh the silence of the narrow streets is almost complete, thick, enveloping, buffeted only by a far-off muffled tremor of sound which serves to accentuate the soundless misty state of the moment.

Minnewater in the mists of Autumn

And appropriately, other seasonal features have disappeared together with the green leaves. All the Trauma exhibits in the 2021 Triennale have now been dismantled and have sadly vanished from Brugge, their season of performance, over! Terraces often lack clientele as the cooler weather settles in and the ice cream shops have fewer customers!! Cafe menus displayed on pavements, feature rabbit stew and fish soup with salads rarely mentioned. Padded jackets are back with scarves and woolly hats replacing summer sandals and T shirts. But the inevitability of the expected changes are somehow reassuring in spite of climate change and Cop26; we are heartened by the implicit promise of the world still turning, somehow deciphering unexpected signals from Nature but continuing in its undeviating individual orbit. However, publicity on global climate change has made people abruptly aware of our existential need for the familiar landscapes and weather and sharpened the communal fear of significant, irreversible planetary change and loss. Delight in the shades and mists of Autumn this year is tinged with a certain uneasy apprehension. 

The Bruges Diptych in the slow act
of deconstruction. The Goudenhandrei
seems empty now though nearby
houses are released from captivity!

Ethereal, other-worldly, in its black and white beauty.

Russet hues catch the Autumn spirit

**** Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning.