Autumn has always been my favourite season, and I think it goes right back to childhood. I’ve never been able to explain exactly why, but I know it has something to do with the colour orange. It’s my favourite colour, and always has been, not one I could necessarily wear, but one I love to surround myself with. Orange candlelight flickering in a darkening room. Pumpkins on a doorstep. That particular golden orange light you only get for a few weeks a year, low in the sky, warm even as the air turns cold.
There’s a moment in autumn, you probably know it too, when the evenings start drawing in and the air gets that first proper chill, and you realise you need a blanket if you’re going to sit outside a little longer. That moment always feels significant to me. It’s the world quietly telling you something is shifting.
I’m lucky enough now to have a log burner in my house. It was one of the things I wanted most when we found this place, and I remember the relief when it was finally in and lit for the first time. Through the summer months, when everyone else is out enjoying the long warm evenings, I’m often round the back splitting logs, stacking them in the log store, letting them dry out ready for winter. It probably looks like a strange way to spend a summer afternoon. But it gives me a real feeling of purpose storing, preparing, quietly getting ready to hunker down when the cooler months arrive. There’s something deeply satisfying about that kind of preparation. It’s not just practical. It feels almost instinctive, like something we’re meant to do.
And maybe that’s really what autumn is about. After the business of summer the long days, the socialising, the sense of always needing to be doing something, being somewhere autumn arrives and gives us permission to slow down. To come back inside. To reconnect, not just with the people we love, but with ourselves.
I think of it as a season that sits right between life and death. The trees don’t fight it they let their leaves go, one by one, without struggle. There’s no panic in it, just a quiet, graceful release. I love watching the squirrels at this time of year, busily gathering and storing food, and the birds beginning to gather before their long journey south. Everything in nature seems to understand that this is a season of preparation, not loss. Nothing is ending. It’s simply changing shape for a while.
I find that thought comforting, and I think it’s one we could all do with sitting with a little more. We spend so much of our lives rushing forward, and autumn is one of the only times of year that nature actually asks us to pause. To reflect on the months behind us. To notice what we’ve grown, what we’ve learned, what we might need to let go of before winter comes. It’s not a sad kind of pause, it’s a hopeful one. A season of quiet optimism, because we know that even as the world grows darker and colder, we’re preparing for something. We’re not just enduring the months ahead; we’re getting ready to make them warm.
That’s really what the fire in the log burner means to me. It’s not just about staying warm, though there’s nothing quite like that first fire of the season. It’s a small symbol of everything autumn represents: the work we did in the summer, quietly and without fuss, so that later we could sit back, gather the people we love around us, and simply be together in the glow of it.
So when the evenings start drawing in this year, and you find yourself reaching for a blanket, or lighting a candle, or watching the leaves finally let go. I hope you can feel what I feel. Not an ending. A gentle turning inward. A season built for reflection, for gathering close the people who matter, and for trusting that even as the light fades, we’re preparing for warmth again.
