Note Four
October 2026
By Rachel
There is a particular moment in autumn when you realise that summer has gone. It isn’t necessarily the first cold morning or the first time you reach for a coat. It is something quieter.
The light changes. The mornings smell different. Suddenly, almost overnight, the landscape seems to have been repainted.
The leaves move through green to yellow, orange, red and brown. The bracken fades. The fells take on a different shape beneath lower skies and softer light.
Even familiar walks feel unfamiliar, or perhaps more familiar, as if returning to something from the past.
It isn’t just what you see.
There is the smell of damp leaves underfoot. The earthy smell of wood drifting through the air. Wet earth and moss after rain. The particular smell of autumn in the woods that somehow seems impossible to describe until you are standing in it.
Then there are the sounds.
Leaves crunching beneath your feet. Rain against the windows. Wind moving through trees that are gradually becoming more bare.
Autumn seems to change the rhythm of things.
Summer encourages us outwards with long days, light evenings, walks, picnics and sitting outside until the sun finally disappears.
Autumn feels more inward.
The evenings draw in. We light fires and lamps. We reach for books. We spend more time indoors but somehow become more aware of what is happening outside.
Yet autumn is also a season of beginnings. Perhaps more than any other time of year, it feels like a fresh start.
The academic year begins. School bags are packed, university terms start and new routines take shape. After the slower pace of summer, there is a sense of returning, resetting and beginning again.
Then there is the anticipation of what comes next. Bonfires, fireworks, Halloween and the first signs of Christmas begin to appear on the horizon. The year may be moving towards winter but there is still plenty to look forward to.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
I like that idea, partly because autumn has always reminded me of going back to school. The new term. New books. New exercise books with their clean pages waiting to be filled. The familiar routines return, but with the sense that somehow you have been given another chance to begin.
Perhaps that is why I often associate this time of year with learning and with writers. So many of the books and authors that first captured my imagination belong, in my memory, to those autumn terms: sitting in a classroom, opening a new book, discovering a writer for the first time and feeling that small sense of possibility that comes with not yet knowing where the story will take you.
It feels particularly fitting that I am now a teacher myself. Every September and October, I find myself back in that same cycle of beginnings. New pupils, new classes, new books, new ideas. The academic year starts again and, in a small way, so do I.
We often think of spring as the season of new beginnings, yet there is something about autumn that can make you feel just as ready to start again. The cooler air brings a sense of clarity. The landscape changes and somehow encourages us to look at things differently.
Last week, while out running through Powter Howe, I caught sight of a russet-red squirrel darting out of the bushes.
It was there for only a few seconds, but it stopped me in my tracks.
There was something about its colouring against the autumn leaves that made it feel almost part of the landscape itself.
It was a small moment, easily missed.
Perhaps that is what I love about this time of year.
In autumn, you pay attention.
You notice the direction of the wind, the colour of the sky, the dampness of the ground and the changing light. You notice things that you might otherwise run straight past.
Change is everywhere. The trees are letting go of their leaves. The days are getting shorter. The landscape is quietly preparing itself for winter.
There is something beautiful in that, perhaps because it doesn’t last.
A few windy days can strip the trees almost completely. The path that was covered in gold one week can be bare the next.
I think that is why I love returning to the same places. Not because they stay the same, but because they don’t.
The path is still there. The stream is still running. The fell is still rising ahead.
But the light is different. The leaves are different. The smell of the air is different.
If you take the time to look, you might notice something you have never seen before.
Perhaps that is autumn’s quiet invitation: to look a little longer, to slow down and to appreciate what is here before it changes again.
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