A changing of the seasons.

Wistful is how I feel about autumn, a season I didn’t experience for the first eighteen or so years of my life.

Funny how quickly you get used to things: layers, scarves, falling leaves. Seasons, and not just “rainy” and “even rainier”. Or, in these Anthropocene days, “dry” and “drought”.

Wistful, a melancholy, a longing. Not a longing for the persistence of summer - not and never my favourite season; too humid, too sticky, too full of impossible expectations. No, instead a restrained ruefulness about the coming winter, with its bone-chilling winds and long dark days.

An in-between, this season. A time of transition, of migration, of reaping. Fall.

Attribution

There is an autumn sadness upon me,
A dreamfulness in my heart,
And a wistful sense of longing.
There is faint moaning music
Like cries of departing birds.
— from Before Sleep by Elsa Gidlow