The first leaves fall like a warning. Then there’s the scurrying winds. The lingering, sweaty warmth. The fresh damp, building a shanty town of black mould-spots upon my bathroom ceiling.

But way before this I’ve felt a foreboding. Midsummer, when the protracted June days should be a luxury of light-filled pleasure, and I’m preoccupied already with just long it will be until another spring. Next spring, when I’ll finally shake off winter and feel, as if I am a plant, as if I am a bird, my incredible buddings and greenings, my sweet ambitions to sing the brightest, most brilliant songs of the entire year. My desire to jump for joy and high-five the air is almost uncontainable.

May’s back disappears around the corner into June like a loved child starting school for the first time and already I miss it. By late summer it has developed into something more acute (though there is no comparison here with genuine Seasonal Affective Disorder, which is a seriously problematic condition for its sufferers) but there’s no doubt I do feel blue. Autumn’s messy braiding with the end of summer accentuates the feeling of distance from spring, and my craving for it to return becomes so intense that I look forward, even, to inclement January, just for its sense of newness, of the year turning, its small signs of fresh life. Catkins, snowdrops, the chance hearing of a blackbird singing, maybe.

But then there appears to be some reprieve, the illusion of an early gift sent from next year. Often, in September, a sense of renaissance, a brief return of some spring-like value. A feeling of change in the air, and not just in the occasional requirement for a cardigan. Whether it is in birdsong flourishing again after the late summer’s hiatus – when many birds fall conspicuously silent as they go into feather moult, or flushes of belated wildflowers in the verges, or some other ‘green’ hint of that long cast-off season.

And there’s a place I go to, not a secret exactly, but a well-known escape. It’s not quite season-neutral, but it is somewhere it is possible to hide in for a while, should you choose the right spot, from the mercurial conditions of life outside. Though commerce flows between its doors, it is somewhere where what happens elsewhere feels less significant. Where I might find, and whenever I want it too, other perspectives to my own, not just on the seasons but on almost anything you could think of.  

I visit the bookshop almost every time I’m in my local town, for no good reason other than a wish to just be here. It may be tiny, but the bookshop feels like my personal cathedral. Today, with my daughter spending time after school with a friend, I’ve no need to collect her. I’m given a gift of free time. I need little excuse but the day I’ve just worked through – its own climate disorderly, a hotchpotch, fractious season – seems like a good one. I drive to town purely for the luxury of a visit to the shop. To forget everything. Forget nature, except in words, and worship books for a while.

I sit in the brown leather bucket chair by the back door, where there’s a modern glass-roofed extension to the main body of the shop. I look up through the glass to rain which coats it slick as glycerine. Above, there is the strangely domestic reassurance of a tall brown-bricked chimney pot which points towards a sky of almost-total cloud cover, with just a couple of gaps permitting a memory of blue to show through. The door, which leads to a small courtyard garden, is open, and a cool wind floats in like a voice, an old, quiet, measured voice in contrast to the animated clusters of conversation in progress amongst the shop’s volume-crowded spaces.  Though rarely empty of customers, the bookshop is busy with a pre-Christmas boost in book-interest, and this feels bright and positive, this general air of enthusiasm, this pottering, chattering, browsing, choosing.

I barely fit in the chair, with a pile of my own choice of books wedged in beside me. Books of nature writing and memoir, including a story about a four-acre wood, a garden in the sky, a thousand mile walk through Scotland to Cornwall, and a mother who finds relief from post-natal depression through growing things. There is nothing which sings more beautifully to me, blackbirds aside, than the potential pleasure of a glut of brand-new books just picked off the shelves, the possible future pleasure of the reading of one, the present pleasure of a transient, noncommittal dipping in and out of pages of lucid prose.

In the garden, autumn gently suggests itself in the tones of an acer’s red leaves and the stippling of rust on the white metal seat, though the tree may be the variety whose leaves are red throughout summer too. Still, sitting here, blessedly not hot for a change, on yet another wet day in a week of rain, it feels very much like summer’s out. But this might be a good thing. The rain has brought essential moisture to drought-parched soils, and the yen to forage books for delicious words temporarily offsets my obsession with the progress of nature’s calendar.

I do not buy a book. But there are possibilities for next month. I sit and read  paragraphs, considering. I observe the gentle internal pressure of pleasing bustle instead of what’s going on outside. I notice people and their own atmospheres (mostly upbeat). This short time of  contemplation (apparently unobserved by others – people glide past my position in the chair without a glance in my direction, as though I too am merely furniture) is as centering, as relaxing, as swimming, or laying in grass and watching summer clouds drift overhead. Not to ‘stand and stare’ (W H Davies) but to sit and skim-read a flow of words, whilst feeling insulated, somehow, from the flow of time. When I leave the shop I feel only the slightest twinge of guilt at not having actually bought anything. I’ve ‘engaged’ instead, and I know I’ll be back.

It’s Friday afternoon. Tomorrow, the weekend. As I walk towards the car, which waits for me at Waitrose car park, outside the Mountain Warehouse I see a woman wearing yellow shoes. Flat-soled, round-toed lace-ups in buttersoft leather, the rich colour of buttercups. The shoes grab my attention too. They represent something beyond mere footwear. Hope, perhaps.  Yellow shoes seem like a bet against gloom.

The sun’s come out too, lighting up the early autumn sky like a candle, bidding the blueness back. At the supermarket entrance two women greet each other in the effusive way that women are so good at, then fall easily and laughingly into conversation. A work colleague drives past in her big black car and smiles and waves at me.

The drought has brought early leaf loss to a number of trees. The long rainless weeks from about midsummer – at last relieved – have witnessed the stress of trees in the product of the crispest, dryest, brownest leaves I’ve ever seen, released to lay on the ground here and there in scattered drifts like a mess of cereal flakes.  But in the carpark, the leaves on the small but hardy London planes, planted like island trees between the parking spaces, appear, for the most part, still green and pliant. Their small canopies of oversized leaves shaped like five-fingered, flickering flames are glossed by the afternoon’s late sunshine. I dawdle to the car, glancing up into the lovely green light of these zesty parasols.

This morning, there was birdsong. The kitchen window open, as I ate a bowl of cereal at the table – and though it’s not unusual to hear it year-round – a wren sang its water-clear notes. A robin too. There was more – I’m sure I heard a dunnock’s sweet, abbreviated phrase – just the once though. Above the slightly subdued chirps of sparrow, there were the usual protesting calls of collared doves, the squabbling of starlings, and ……? There was another bird, but I was busy and did not take time to listen closely enough. Though I think, really, the listening mattered far less than just the birds. That they were present and best of all, saying so, seemed the important fact. That the silence was beginning to.end. The birds are all for each other, of course. They’ve no idea of their importance to me; us. Only I need that comforting confirmation that ‘all’s right with the globe’ (Ted Hughes).  But I do know that their annual, still unnerving quiet serves as crystal example of just how lost, I think, we’d be without these familiar sounds of garden and street. How lonely the world seems in the absence of birds. Not of course just the whole (questionable) ‘chorus’ but crucially the individuals, the bird and their species.

Now though, rather than for courtship and mating, most of the birds, I think, are singing for food and territory. For autumn and winter survival. But what’s pure practicality to birds is pure therapy to me. To hear them again. It’s enough.

I begin the short journey home, stopping my slow passage along the tree’d boulevards of the carpark  to let other shoppers in and out. Poet Mark Doty calls this continual restlessness of movement a situation where ‘no space, no  desire…..should remain unfilled’. My own pace, contrastingly distilled to a deliberate leisure, has had the same yet opposite effect. I have enjoyed my desire not being fulfilled. It has left me with a hunger for what’s to come. Later.

Spring’s still a long way off, still distant as France, but I’m reminded that there are things which can feel springlike, can borrow some of that nubile essence. That sense of beginning, or of not-quite-ending, that feeling of possibility, of everything made new again.  

Driving out of town, there’s reaffirmation on the roadsides, too. They’re greening up, nourished by the generous rains, the grass returns like a healthy skin regrowing over all earthly wounds. There are wildflowers too, in colonies of Cat’s ear dandelions and creamy sprays of yarrow. Such fecundity, at the end of this dry summer. It’s almost numinous.

I find a kind of spring in words also, both spoken and written. In the sunlight of laughter and greetings and talk. And of course, in the bookshop, where there’s always something fresh to start on, to begin again with. Where whatever the time outside, there’s  delight to be found.

A car shushes down the lane and breaks the short-lived romance of silence. As I glance out of the bedroom window at the disappearing evening, the sky has suddenly switched from a mellow dusk into instant night – it is that time of year, I suppose. The evening no longer stretches out in the leisurely disposal of Summer, but simply ends. It is September. It is unequivocally Autumn. Soon, on the 21^st it will be the Autumn equinox, when day and night are of equal lengths. But the weight of the charcoal cloud pressing down upon the lingering red traces of sunset suggests an imposed quietness which is pleasing. No birdsong, not even the robin’s newly melancholy notes. The sky, at least, is soundless.

Now there is plush dark. All traces of the day erased. A plane light blinks out its trail in red across the sky. In the near distance there is the Beckley transmitter, a telecommunications and broadcasting mast to the north east of Oxford, a tower of lights like a pin of red diamante against a background of deep velvet. I only ever notice the mast in the later part of the year. Because then I notice the dark, too.

I think of the mast like a sort of inland lighthouse, guiding me ‘home’ in the months of the year when the darkness can feel overwhelming. I look out of this window or the kitchen window on the shortest of afternoons and instantly I am enlivened by a mere glimpse of its glimmering structure. I feel like a ship pulled towards port. 

I read about the mast, courtesy of Wikipaedia. Its history is judiciously detailed and only adds to the peculiar sense of tenderness I experience when I witness it in its nocturnal radiance. It stands on a hill just a few miles from the city in a rural district dominated by farmland and woodland and the large wetland reserve of Otmoor, which lays around 400 feet below the base of the mast which itself rises over 500 feet into the night sky. I have never noticed it in daylight, though I do not look for it then.

The mast has stood on that hill since 1962, and has been transmitting radio and television programming in various and complex-seeming modes of advancing technology ever since. Into my home the mast brings the World, various, colourful, an ineluctable part of my modern life. Without those voices and pictures – and wifi and mobile services more recently – what would my Winter be, what would my existence be? Quieter, yet graver too. This knowledge, these things, lift me.

It has been another hot, bright day. But now an owl calls through the dark – a tawny – just once and faintly, but unmistakeably. The owl calls it’s soft, cool, hooting woodwind.

It is raining now, in moments, but the mast never stops glowing. The mast may be the antithesis of nature, and nature is as much a part of me as I am it, yet I understand that the culture that the mast brings me is ineffably ‘me’ too.

I listen to the rain beginning and ending and beginning again and I stare at the mast, and I thank it. Then I close the curtains on the night and go downstairs to see my husband, my daughter, and a screen filled with the coloured-in time of television. The mast is more than just the sum of its parts. The mast brings me the World, and the mast brings me home, too.

The scene is so peaceful it is like standing in a painting brought to life, animated by the fresh swish-swoosh wash of the winds. Early Autumn winds, still gentle, as if only in training for later on. The winds cast patterns of organised wrinkles across the lacquered surface of the river, which is swollen with rain from a previous incarnation. 

The water’s glossiness offers hints of reflectivity. Roughly rendered branch-shapes of drooping Crack willow sacrifice a slender, lanceolate leaf every now and again, to be carried away like cargo on the currents. Impressionistic daubs of thick, neat clusters of still-upstanding rushes and sedges at the river’s margins. A small bird fidgeting between stems within a mass of rushes, its same repeated shape visible and then invisible, like something hidden inside this composition which only certain eyes can see.  It is a question mark. An incongruity, in this very English-seeming late-year scene. Perhaps one of the summer’s warblers? A reed warbler, maybe – a migrant bird which forms its tiny bowl-like nest using the plant’s stems as support struts – and which, travelling from as far inland as here – should surely be making its way by now towards its wintering grounds? Its gargantuan return journey spanning the distances of far vaster canvases than this miniscule scene. Over Southern Europe’s shifting, dustier hues, across a wash of desert, and eventually to Africa, with its cliched ochres and reds.

The sky, above this pond-sized meander-bend, grading from a foreground of water and grazing land punctuated distantly by sheep, on into stands of woodland, eventually backed by the series of whale-like humps which make up the long spinal scarp of the Chiltern hills on the far horizon, is cornflower-blue on this rinsed-clean day. In the upper part of the background, dozens of classic cumulus are caught mid-drift.

I stand on the ‘third’ bank at this broad juncture where the river splits into two channels. My eyes move automatically towards a willow tree close by which flickers with varied birdlife.  Inside, I feel as excited as the birds appear to be, yet must remain as still as if I was just a drawing of myself, in my desire to observe the tree’s goings-on yet not disturb a single bird from its activities.

A chiffchaff is singing its sweet two-note confection. Chifchaff chifchaff. As I hear it doing every March, when the birds usually arrive locally. Some may already be here – over-wintering, as chiffchaffs increasingly do now, in our milder Winter climates. Nonetheless, this feels like an oddly vivacious moment, a little pause within this long slow decay-time that stretches out between late Summer and late Autumn, a moment reminiscent of Spring. Perhaps this bird too will overwinter in England, perhaps it will remain close by. Perhaps it will leave yet. And even though I know most birds will sing at times throughout the year, in differing modes and when opportunity allows, the chiffchaff seems to have some special and particular power over my sense of seasonal compass.

The willow leaves, still mostly green, are lent a soft gleam by sunlight falling over the canopy. But clutches of leaves here and there are yellow and rusted with brown, like over-ripe banana skins. 

Even in my statue-like composure, my mind is still working, and I guess at the birds’ interest in the tree: insects, or maybe tiny mites. These are invisible to my eyes, at least without some form of magnification, these scraps of chitin and wing and antennae whose habitats are leaf and bark and which only acute avian vision seems capable of seeing. Another hidden element.

Blue tits call and here’s a troupe of long-tailed tits engaged in their collective of call and answer like tiny silver bells being rung, and there’s a robin’s wistful melodrama and perhaps even another, even more unexpected bird. Another summer warbler. It is a willow warbler, perhaps, which is vocalizing.

Or perhaps not. It could, instead, be another chiffchaff – their songs are distinctive but their calls barely so. The willow warbler’s name fits the tree though not only this tree.

If this is a painting it is now fully alive. The leaf warblers in their drabber tree-shades and the blue tits with their plumages like old-fashioned tea-china, all searching busily through the canopy with needle-fine skills.

In each one’s miniature elegance the tree is not just an English riparian willow but something more Japanese and ‘just so’. Cherry-blossom delicate.

Though across the water, jackdaws pass overhead in a flinty-voiced, exuberant rabble.

Spring seems to haunt Autumn in almost-equinoctial days and sudden conspicuous bursts of life on warm blue days and suggestions, hints of what’s to come, later, in another season, another picture. I dream of Spring all year. Even when it’s finally here. There is no season quite as special nor as fleeting.

On the water, seven willow leaves in a gradient of sizes move off in alternative directions, shifted out by frazzling surface-currents like family members dividing themselves off into different lives. To the back of the river, where riverbank shades out into floodplain meadow, there are thickets of grass and nettle, and teasel and hogweed represented in tall, sculptural forms – physically imposing seed-heads which also act as perfect feeding stations for finches in Winter.  

I could stay here all day, the one human being in this composition, observing all these images of natural life. No, not images. This may look like a set but is real, lives being lived, precisely, specifically. Like the patterns on the water driven by the movements of the wind. It would be easy to stay here. I’m so still I’ve just become part of the scene. No threat to anything.

But I can’t, of course. However beautiful that would be, it would not be as good as going home now, and remembering this short episode, this brief composition of time and activity and stillness, whenever I want to. Summoning it to mind like a picture, like a photograph. Only I’ll remember it was more than that.