Autumn Again

I was taking a retrospective look at my blog recently, and was stunned by how much I wrote last autumn. I kept a treasure trove of field notes on everything the season was giving me during a time of quiet and isolation. This season, the hustle of community is back, along with the haze of attempting to write up my thesis, and I’ve found it hard to get into the headspace of word-crafting my surroundings. Despite this, the season has given richly and I’ve been fed by warm earthy palettes, frosty mornings, flame and lemon leaves, full moons, mushrooms and chestnuts, sunbeams and sunsets. In lieu of words I’ve captured as much as I can on my often inadequate camera. I’m going to attempt to decorate the images with some remembered notes, because this autumn deserves all the attention I can give it, even in memory.

Newnham Garden

Newnham is already warm with red brick, and adding scarlet ivy makes it pure eye candy in autumn. The gardeners also keep jewels of flowers going well into autumn, my favorites being the nasturtiums in the vegetable beds that thrived until mid-November. I would pop a few of the orange and red and yellow blossoms into my mouth every time I passed by for the novelty of the satin petals and the spicy kick. I was also sure to share some with my friends when I gave them a tour of the garden.

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Ground level

Autumn is apparently a prime time to find the fruiting bodies of fungi popping up in the damp and decay everywhere. I saw the head gardener walking around my garden one day, looking closely at the ground. When I went out to chat with her, she told me she was looking for mushrooms to record, because the whole crew had become obsessed since taking a mushroom ID course and were competing to find the most species. Around the same time, I read the popular science book Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, a dynamic Cambridge alum with a keen passion for fungi. The book redoubled my awe for the unstoppable force of mycelia, the underground filaments that pervade the soil, rotting wood, and plant roots, and the incredible versatility and variety of mushrooms and spores. I can’t identify any fungi for the life of me, but I did start to keep a lookout for them and documented some fun mushrooms under garden gates, piled on stumps, and fairy-like in my front lawn. My favorite was a cartoonish bobble-head cap (if it’s not named that, it should be). Also featured: cyclamen and a spread of horse chestnuts.

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Cambridge Botanic Garden

I would have liked to pay a few more visits to the Botanic Garden to catch the flaming in and out of different trees, but mostly followed this via social media. I did make one visit and was captivated by a yellow ash, the larch going orange by the lake, and purple autumn crocuses.

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Misty morning jogs

My occasional habit of morning jogs was richly rewarded by the morning confluence of light, mist, and frost. One morning on Coe Fen I found myself dazzled by two planes of light: the silvery dew-smothered, mist-hovered grass, and angel-bright sunlight pouring and slicing into it where trees split the light like prisms. Between them, people moved over the pavement and through their morning, joggers and bike commuters and parents shepherding children to school, melting into the sunlight at the end of the path.

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Grantchester Meadows was warm with sun and still-green leaves in late October, cows still grazing; leaves orange and grass frosted a few weeks later.

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Beechwoods

I cycled over to Beechwoods Nature Reserve in October in pursuit of the coppery abundance I wrote about last autumn. I was a bit early for the full carpet, but still got some color and crisp air and rural idylls. I was amazed by how familiar the small tract of plantation was after a year, down to the elderly couples and exuberant dogs with the run of the place. I walked around the whole perimeter and flushed out a grey partridge from the undergrowth.

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Neighborhood Leaves

I didn’t actually need to seek far for color. On every path I took out from my house, yellow sang to me. I realized this autumn that yellow is my true home. Blood red and neon orange ombre are like sizzling injections of dopamine, but yellow embraces, haloing the path behind the sports field and the gate into the college, warm infusions of serotonin telling me the world is a good place. I felt kinship with the just-warmer-than-lemon field maples, their sun-butter starring the soil, and with the bronzed-gold beech mellow and slow-burning in the gray, and the warmth of the wisteria flaming up the redwood in front of my house. My camera fails miserably to capture the depth of the glow that my eyes imbibe, and I can never look long enough—my saturation point is even flightier than the flaring of color while the air holds it, before it browns down into the earth.

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Cherry Hinton

As if the neighborhood leaves weren’t enough, my cycle to church in Cherry Hinton was a wonderland for several weeks. Brooklands Avenue was a tunnel of color, like fireworks but much better. Cherry Hinton Hall Park was aflame. Cherry Hinton Chalk Pits were a different palette, cream and maroon where the chalk grassland shrubs had turned.

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London Temple

I visited the London Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for the first time since well before the pandemic, and in addition to the spiritual boost, there were gorgeous trees on the grounds.

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Around Town

The iconic parts of Cambridge turned up the charm with fall color. On cycle rides I would do U-turns when I saw a scarlet blaze in a courtyard, and on jogs I didn’t get my heart rate up much because I kept stopping to take pictures of stupidly gorgeous scenery, e.g. cows grazing amidst burning bushes on the Backs.

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Sunset

I started working a few days a week in my old office space again, at the top of a tower in the David Attenborough Building, and was rewarded with some stunning sunsets over Cambridge rooftops. With the sun setting before 4 pm lately, it’s easy to miss the sky going pearly and then pink and flame, but when I caught it from my west-facing bedroom desk I decided it was time to walk to the Co-op. There are times when color and light are more important than work.

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Night

With a good half of the day in darkness, I’ve had plenty of chances for moonlit strolls. On Bonfire Night, I went to Jesus Green, barely escaped the fireworks shooting horizontally across the grass amidst groups of carousing teenagers, and was rewarded with reflections on the River Cam. And the full moon in the cold sky has kept me company more than once on the way home from orchestra rehearsal across Parker’s Piece.

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The brevity of autumn, prolonged just enough by the staggering of senescence across the town’s trees, is something of a gift itself. Its intensity invited me to drink deeply, and to remember how good it was once it was over. Keep remembering to live, autumn says.