Chapter Nine: The Sunday of Summer
I’m 41 this month.
Which should probably feel significant in some way that I’m not entirely sure I’ve worked out yet. But here’s what I do know: I bought a new notebook last week, with thick cream pages and the cover is pristine, and when I opened the first page and smelled it, I felt exactly the same thing I felt at eleven years old on the first day of September.
That anything is possible.
January has never done this for me. I know it’s supposed to, the new year, the fresh start, the resolution I’ve written in three different notebooks and abandoned by the 14th. But January feels like hibernation dressed up as ambition. January is dark and cold and the garden is asleep and honestly so am I.
September, though. September feels different. The chaos of summer is over, the beautiful, exhausting, sun-soaked chaos of it, and suddenly I have all this mental space back. The school routine returns, yes packed lunch boxes in all their glory, frantically naming every piece of clothing your children own, and digging the uniform out of the bottom of the wardrobe. The evenings cool a little, perfect for dropping cardigan over you’re shoulders, the garden and children don’t demand quite so much of me, and something in me quietly exhales whilst also thinking: right. Let’s get going . . and no not starting the Christmas prep in September.
There’s something deeply British about this feeling. The back-to-school energy that never quite leaves you, even when you’re forty-one and it’s your children going back rather than you. The new pencil case. The uncracked spine of the exercise book. The smell of new stationery that full-of-possibility smell that should be a perfume and would make millions.
September is my January. It always has been and long may it continue.
September Snapshot (dates worth a circle)
You don’t need to mark every date — think of these as gentle pins, not instructions. One or two is plenty.
1 A1 September - Start of Meteorological Autumn / World Letter Writing Day: September officially marks the beginning of autumn and, with World Letter Writing Day. The oldest form of reaching someone. So I’m marking it with my first substack version of my Joyful Almanac.
6 September - My Birthday: In case you were planning on sending a gift!
11 September - New Moon in Virgo: The new moon that falls in Virgo, the sign of fresh starts, quiet precision, the clean page. If you're going to begin something, this is the night to name it.
21 September - St Matthew's Day: "St Matthew's Day bright and clear brings good wine in the next year." I choose to believe this every September. I recommend you do too.
22 September - Autumn Equinox: Day and night equal. The great pivot. The year crossing from the light half to the dark half, the moment you can feel in your bones whether you're paying attention or not.
26 September - Full Harvest Moon, 5:49pm BST: The most ancient moon name of the year.
29 September - Michaelmas Day: The feast of St Michael and the last day to pick blackberries - the full story is in the Folklore section below, but trust me: pick them before the 29th!
These are the gentle pins that hold September in place. Choose the ones that feel like yours.
Summer is softening. That's not an ending. That's the best bit.
〰️
Summer is softening. That's not an ending. That's the best bit. 〰️
Flora & Feelings
The garden, the apples, the dahlias, the first signs, and the flowers getting serious
The Garden - Alive Again After the Rains
Can we talk about the September garden for a second?
Because after the heat and the dust and the hosepipe-bans of August, the rains have finally arrived, and the garden has responded with life. She looks alive again. Perky, even. My borders are full of Japanese anemones, white and pale pink and slightly ethereal. The dahlias still going, glowing in the softer September light and the sunflowers are standing tall, and I swear they are smiling at me.
And let’s not forget the apples. They are lying all over the wet lawn, some perfect, some slightly bruised, (and the wasps are absolutely delighted). Every time I look at them I think: Crumble!
The Snippet of Autumn Starting to Show
It’s in the edges first; the tips of the leaves in the lane beginning to turn. It’s the elderberries hanging heavy and dark purple in the hedgerows. The conkers falling, those glossy mahogany things, that are still the most satisfying object to hold in your hand, It’s the helicopters dancing and spinning down from the sycamores. It’s the smell of the morning changing, the damp earth and the fallen leaves, kicking through piles of crispy leaves, the question is will this be during the end of September or October? One strong wind storm and you blink and you miss it.
September is still warm enough to just be outside but cool enough to do those big jobs you been procrastinating on all summer. This is September’s gift, the in-between weather that is somehow the most useful and most pleasant of the entire year.
The Flowers Getting Serious
Summer flowers are generous and slightly undisciplined, are you too reminiscing on the armfuls of sweet peas, bowls of peonies, roses everywhere, the more the better and filling every surface.
September flowers are different. September flowers are considered.
The dahlias are still going. But now I’m choosing fewer, placed more carefully. Maybe one jug on the kitchen table or even one stem on the windowsill. The abundance of August gives way to something more intentional.
And something else is beginning: the flowers that belong to this exact turning moment. Michaelmas daisies, those small starry purple things that appear in September. Hydrangeas going over, the blooms drying on the stem, turning from pink and blue and white into the colour of old linen and faded photographs. These are September's flowers and they are just as beautiful as the full blooms were.
I love to fill my home with branches of rosehips. Hawthorn berries. Stems of dried seed heads from the garden. These are what go into my vases now, things found on a walk or cut from the garden, placed simply and the last weeks
The Bulbs
I spend a few hours every September digging holes and dropping in bulbs.
It’s one of my favourite things I do all year, which I find slightly surprising every time, because it looks like nothing from the outside. Just a person in a garden with a trowel, making holes, dropping things in, covering them over.
But know I’m older and hopefully wiser, I know what I’m doing. I’m writing letters to spring. Each bulb is a promise; a tulip, a daffodil, an allium, that will sit beneath the cold earth all winter and emerge, right on time, in March or April, into a garden that will have completely forgotten they were there.
This is what the garden has taught me more than anything else: that the best things require faith in a season you can’t yet see.
The Smell of September
Someone needs to bottle it. Not in a wellness candle way, in an actual perfume way, the kind you’d wear every day. Damp earth after rain. Fallen leaves beginning. The last warm afternoons carrying something sweet and slightly overripe. The smell of a Somerset lane in early autumn when the hedgerows are full of elderberries, blackberries, the first red hips, and the whole thing smells like the countryside at its most itself.
I walk more in September than any other month. Not because I’m trying to. Just because the lanes are doing something I can’t resist and it turns out I’m actually very easy to tempt outside.
Weather Soul - The Wordsworth Poem
September, 1819 - written by William Wordsworth in the Romantic tradition of standing in a field having feelings about the weather and the line that I can’t stop thinking about is this:
“Departing summer hath assumed
An aspect tenderly illumed,
The gentlest look of spring.”
He noticed what I’m starting to notice every September: that the ending has the quality of a beginning. That autumn arriving looks, in a certain light, exactly like spring. The paradox of September. Where beginnings and endings look almost the same, and for a small moment in time you could be going either way.
He wrote it in 1819. I read it in 2026. Some things don’t change.
September, I feel I’m just bragging about my birthday month now, but there is no denying, it is still warm enough to sit outside with something cold, a glass of rosé or a bowl of Eton mess, I don’t judge. But cool enough to want a jumper by seven.
And then there is, The Indian summer, that one precious week that sometimes happens in late September, the gift the season occasionally gives us, I am, as ever, hoping. I will soak up every single second of it if it comes.
I will soak up every single second of it if it comes.
Folklore Focus: Michaelmas, the devil in the blackberry bush, the equinox, and September’s names
The Month That Was Number Seven
September comes from septem which is Latin for seven. It was the seventh month in the original Roman calendar, long before January and February were added and everything was shuffled along. It’s still called seven, and there is something quietly rebellious about a month named for a position it no longer holds, carrying its original identity anyway. September doesn’t care that it’s technically month nine now. September knows what it is.
The Autumn Equinox - 22 September
This is the one I feel, not as a concept but as something that happens in my body. The day and night becoming equal and then tipping, the year crossing from its light half into its dark half, the pivot that every ancient culture built monuments to and that my garden seems to understand without being told. I immediately want to just huddle under a blanket with a warm cup of tea, fluffy socks and rewatch those films I’ve watched 100 times, I think it’s the modern equivalent of hibernation, We’ll just call it Autumn!
The ancient sites; Stonehenge, Avebury, the stone circles I'm lucky enough to live near, and those of Ireland and Scotland, were aligned to this moment. People have been gathering there and marking it for five thousand years. Whatever they understood about this day, they understood it was important enough to build their whole year and world around.
Here in 2026 and Somerset, I just make crumble. But I also take a moment to venture outside on the evening of the 22nd and just let my body feel it, and that feels like enough, as much as I'm trying to slow down, I'm still busy and I have a school-run and work to get up for.
There’s a reason the equinox has always been associated with return, with harvest, with settling accounts, with coming home after the long loose summer. September is Michaelmas approaching, the change from summer indolence to the serious business of putting the house back in order. The house stops being run for guests and starts being run for the family again. The children go back to school, genuinely disruptive but also genuinely structural, and the days shorten, and at some point in September the fire gets lit for the first time.
Michaelmas - 29 September
The feast of St Michael, one of the four great quarter days of the old English calendar. The traditional end of the harvest. The day servants were hired and rents were paid and the year’s accounts were settled. The day you looked at what the summer had produced and decided what came next.
Which, if you think about it, is exactly what September still asks of us. Not in rent and servants and accounts, but in the quieter reckoning of: what did I grow this year, and what am I bringing in?
And it is also the day the devil fell from heaven into a blackberry bush. Quite similar to Mummy Pig!
He was so offended by this, can you blame him, really?! That he cursed the berries. Spat on them. Stamped on them. And from that day forward, no blackberry picked after Michaelmas is worth eating.
Whether or not you believe in diabolical fruit interference, the September frosts that follow Michaelmas genuinely do affect the fruit. The best blackberries are August and early September blackberries. After the 29th, they really do go watery and tasteless, so pick them before Michaelmas. The devil made his point and he wasn't wrong!
The Harvest Festival
Before harvest festivals became a school thing, the tins of beans on the windowsill, the slightly competitive marrow display, the chorus of ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’, they were something older and more felt.
The last sheaf of grain brought in from the field. The harvest supper. The communal exhale of a community that had worked hard all summer and could finally, together, stop.
The Somerset churches still do it properly, flowers and fruit and vegetables arranged with real care, hymns that have been sung in these buildings since before anyone now living was born, the specific smell of a country church in late September that is candles and old wood and the apples someone brought from their garden.
Conker Season
The horse chestnut falling, those extraordinary glossy mahogany conkers spilling from their spiky green cases onto the Somerset lanes, is one of the most British and most joyful seasonal events of the year and I will not hear otherwise.
Pick them up. Fill your coat pockets. Thread them on string. Soak them in vinegar overnight if you want the competitive edge, which in my experience is still entirely worth doing. Give them to your children and watch what happens.
September in a single object!
Everything is the colour of honey. Don't rush through it.
〰️
Everything is the colour of honey. Don't rush through it. 〰️
Moon Moment: The Sturgeon Moon
Full Moon in Aries - The Harvest Moon
Saturday 26 September 2026 at 5:49pm BST
The most ancient moon name of the year.
Not the most dramatic, that was August’s eclipse. Not the most romantic, that was June’s strawberries. But the most ancient - the one that has meant something to people doing something important for longer than almost any other name we’ve given the sky.
The Harvest Moon, it rises on the evening of the 26th just after sunset, meaning the sky will already be golden when it appears on the horizon, enormous and amber. And for the next three or four evenings it rises only 25 to 30 minutes later than the night before, instead of the usual 50. Which means for several evenings there is bright moonlight right at dusk, the sky staying bright, the fields staying visible, the harvest able to continue after the sun goes down.
This is why it was named. Farmers literally used it, worked by it, timed their harvests around it. Before electricity, and artificial light, this was the difference between a harvest completed and a harvest lost to autumn frosts. The moon as practical tool. The sky as ally.
After years of living against the seasons, the endless productivity, the go, go, go, I find it equal parts humbling and hilarious, that farmers once lived so completely in step with the sky above them. That the rhythm of the year used to dictate the rhythm of life, rather than the other way around. Somewhere along the way we convinced ourselves that productivity was the season. It wasn't. It still isn't.
But September is the month I feel the urge to return to something more considered. More in step. The Harvest Moon rising over the Somerset fields on the 26th is not just beautiful, it’s a reminder that the season has its own intelligence, its own ancient knowledge, and there is something quietly extraordinary about paying attention to it.
This full moon rises in Aries, the fire sign, the courage sign, the beginning sign. Which feels almost too perfect for the month of the new notebook and the fresh page and the feeling that something is starting even as the year tips into its dark half.
Aries doesn’t look back. Aries says: what’s next? September, in its particular, paradoxical, facing-both-ways way, says exactly the same.
The Harvest Moon Ritual
On the evening of Saturday 26th go outside at dusk. Wait for it to rise. It will appear in the east just after the sun sets in the west, the two of them doing something literally magical with the sky, gold and pink and the deep blue of an autumn evening that is its very own colour and has no proper name.
The first few minutes of a Harvest Moon rising are one of the most beautiful things you will see all year, huge, amber, ancient-feeling, lower in the sky than you expect.
Then, and this is the ritual, think of one thing you want to harvest this autumn. Not a goal. Not a resolution. A harvest, something you’ve been growing all year, quietly, that is now ready. A relationship that has deepened. A creative project that has been building. A version of yourself that has been emerging. Something that has been in the ground since spring, that is now, in this September light, ready to be brought in.
The Harvest Moon rises like an ancient signal, a calling to come home, ready to venture into the dark half of the year. And somehow it feels complete and like something new is beginning. That is September.
New Moon Note
Thursday 11 September - The Notebook Moon
The new moon falls on the 11th, right at the start of the month, right in the back-to-school energy, right in the thick of your new-notebook feeling.
It’s in Virgo, precise, unhurried, the sign that understands the value of a good beginning made quietly. Probably the most September sign imaginable.
Here’s the question to consider, in the days around the new moon:
What’s the one thing you let slide over summer that September is for picking back up?
Not a resolution. Not a self-improvement project. Just the honest inventory. The book that got set aside in June. The piano that hasn’t been touched since July. The therapy or dr’s appointment you kept meaning to reschedule. The friend you’ve been meaning to call since before the school holidays started.
Summer is for letting things drift. That's not a failure, that's what summer is for. The new moon on the 11th is the perfect moment to sit quietly with that question and answer it honestly, on the darkest night of the month.
The Joy Edit
Six invitations for September
Right. Here’s what I think September is actually for; not the blankets and the candles, that’s October, and October can wait. September is something sharper than that. Something more useful. The moment the summer drift ends and the considered life returns, not as a punishment, but as a relief. The exhale of structure after the beautiful chaos of June, July, August.
September is when you stop drifting and start making something again.
Here’s what I think you should do this month:
Buy the notebook and use the first page: Not for a to-do list. Not for a meal plan. For the one honest thing September is asking of you. Open it. Smell it. Write the honest answer to the question the new moon asked. Name it. Then do it.
Pick the blackberries before the 29th: The devil is waiting and Michaelmas is coming. Get to the hedgerow before the frosts do. Fill whatever you have, a colander, a bag, your coat pockets, your children's hands. Come home purple-fingered. Eat some in the lane on the way.
Watch the Harvest Moon rise: Five minutes of your evening. Go outside at dusk, find the eastern horizon, and wait. You will think about it for weeks.
Cook the first roast chicken of the year, properly: Not a quick weeknight version. The real one. Set the table before you sit down. Eat slowly. This is a small act of self-respect after three months of eating standing up. The meal as a return to form.
Make one considered edit to the house: The lamp moved to a better corner. The good chair near the window with the morning light. The summer flowers replaced with something more architectural, dahlias, dried hydrangeas, a branch of rosehips from the lane. One considered change. That's the September edit.
Take a longer walk: Not a wander, a walk. A footpath you haven't done before, a hill you've been meaning to climb, a lane that ends somewhere worth reaching, aka the village pub! The Somerset countryside in September is doing something so beautiful, elderberries, conkers, the first colour in the leaves, the smell of everything simultaneously ending and beginning. Go somewhere. Notice everything on the way. Come back different in the small ways that matter.
Joy Reminder — stick this somewhere obvious: September reminder: The drift is over. The considered life is back. And it's better than you remembered.
Picnic, But Make It September: The Indian summer picnic, the apple orchard, and the basket that knows what it's doing
September’s picnic is the most hopeful one of the year.
Not the most abundant, that was July’s. Not the most authoritative, that was June’s. September’s picnic is the one you pack with full awareness that the season is turning and absolute refusal to let that stop you. The blanket goes down on still-warm ground. The flask appears, this month it might actually be needed. The cardigan comes and flits between your shoulders and your bag, yes it’s that kind of weather.
September’s picnic is the one where you hold summer open for a little longer by simply going. By refusing to let the season close before you’re ready.
The Indian Summer Picnic
If it comes, and I am manifesting it with everything I have, the Indian summer picnic is the best picnic of the entire year.
That one week of late September sunshine, the light already golden and autumnal, the warmth entirely unexpected and entirely welcome. Eating outside in jumpers you suddenly didn’t actually need, drinking something cold you’ve genuinely earned after the summer you’ve had.
The difference between a July picnic and a September Indian summer picnic is this: in July you take the warmth for granted. In September you know, that this might be the last one, and that knowledge makes the food tastes better, the company feels more precious and the afternoon runs longer because nobody wants to be the one who ends it.
If the Indian summer comes this year, use every single second of it. Don’t save it for the weekend. Go on a Tuesday. Life is short and September sunshine is shorter.
The Apple Orchard
The apple picking that’s really just an excuse to wear the jacket.
You know exactly what I mean. The slightly oversized waxed thing, or the good cord, or whatever coat has been waiting since April for its moment. September is when the coat comes back out and the apple orchard is the perfect destination for its first proper outing, the rows of trees, the fruit heavy and ready, the smell of warm apples and damp earth, the children running between the trees with bags that are immediately too full.
Come home with more than you can possibly use. Then there is the crumble you’ll make tonight, the sauce you’ll freeze for winter, the apple left on the kitchen counter that perfumes the whole room for three days.
Obviously the Somerset farm shop will have fifteen varieties you’ve never heard of and all of them are worth trying. Buy one of each. Eat them standing in the car park in the autumn sunshine like someone who knows exactly what they’re doing. Which by the end of September you will!
The Blackberry and Apple Crumble Picnic:
September’s signature dish, baked in a tin, eaten warm if you can manage it with a flask of something hot alongside, or cold from the tin with a spoon because it doesn’t matter, it’s crumble, it’s blackberries from the hedge and apples from the lawn and September in a single container.
Take it somewhere with a view. My preference is the Somerset hills going gold.
What to pack - the September basket:
The crumble. Obviously. In a tin. With a proper spoon.
Good cheese, Godminster, always, in every month.
Something from the apple orchard, a fresh apple eaten in the field, a bottle of local juice, or both
A flask of tea, September makes this feel right again.
A jumper - this month it actually goes on, probably by four o'clock
Elderflower cordial from May if you made it and froze it, the taste of a completely different season, carried into this one
The good glasses, still out, still mandatory.
The jacket, the good one, the one that's been waiting. September has arrived and so has the jacket.
Etiquette, as ever, kindly enforced:
Leave the field as you found it. Wave at everyone, September walkers wave back with a particular warmth, the warmth of people who are also refusing to let summer end before they’re ready. And if it rains, which it might, pack up cheerfully and go home to enjoy the crumble indoors instead.
You went. The apple was eaten in the field. The jacket got its first outing.
The best September picnic is the one where you stayed long enough to need the jumper, ate the crumble from the tin with a spoon, and drove home smelling of apples, fresh air and thinking: I should do this every week.
You should. You won’t. It’s September after all.
Cooking with the Seasons
Apples, blackberries, the first roast, and the kitchen becoming the heart of the house again
September’s kitchen smells different from August’s.
August smelled of tomatoes and basil and warm tarmac drifting through the open window. September smells of apples, sitting in a bowl on the table, perfuming the whole kitchen with something sweet and slightly cidery and entirely, unmistakably, autumn.
The window is still open. But there’s a different quality to the air coming through it.
And something else has shifted. After three months of outdoor tables, blankets,BBQs and meals carried out on trays and eaten standing up in the garden, the kitchen is becoming the heart of the house again. The proper plates get used. The table is set, not just cleared.
The Transitional Farmers Market
September’s farm shop and farmers market is unlike any other, it is the only moment in the year when the last tomatoes sit next to the first squash. When summer and autumn are on the same table simultaneously, neither quite finished, neither quite begun.
The last of the vine tomatoes, still warm, still juicy, still the best thing you can eat with nothing but salt and good bread. The first butternut squash, sitting beside them like something from a different season entirely. The early apples. The first pumpkins.
Buy something from both seasons. Cook them in the same meal. Let September be what it is, the most transitional and most interesting month at the table.
What to Cook This Month
The First Roast Chicken of the Year: Not a quick weeknight version. The real one. A good chicken from the farm shop butcher, a very hot oven, a kitchen that smells magnificent for two hours while you do something else entirely. Set the table before you serve it, real plates, cloth napkins, a glass of wine poured. Sit down. Eat slowly. This is not a Sunday roast for guests. This is a meal for the people who actually live here, made with care. September’s version of coming home.
Blackberry and Apple Crumble on repeat: Blackberries from the hedgerow, apples from the garden or the farm shop, a crumble topping with oats and brown sugar and cold butter rubbed in until it looks like rough sand. Bake until golden and bubbling. Eat with custard from a jug. September’s definitive dish.
The First Soup: September is when the soup pot comes back out. Not a heavy winter soup, a September soup, still light enough for the weather. I suggest roasted tomato with a little cream, the last of the vine tomatoes, slowly roasted, blitzed with stock and a swirl of something good. Or how about apple and butternut squash, if the squash is ready. Eaten from a proper bowl at the kitchen table with the window slightly open and the sound of the garden still coming in. This is the moment the kitchen becomes the heart of the house again. You’ll know it when it happens.
Baked Apples: Core them, fill with butter and brown sugar and cinnamon and a handful of sultanas, bake until soft and collapsing. Eat with cream or custard or vanilla ice cream. One of the most satisfying things you can cook in September. Old-fashioned in the best possible way, which is the only way worth being in September.
Elderberry and Blackberry Upside-Down Cake: Elderberries at the base, blackberries scattered through, a buttery sponge baked on top that becomes the bottom when you turn it out. Make it on a Sunday afternoon when you have no particular reason to make a cake other than that it’s September and the elderberries are there and life is short.
Sloe Gin: The sloes are in the hedgerows, those small dark blue-black berries on the blackthorn, tart enough to make your eyes water if you eat one raw, which you should do at least once just to understand what the gin is working with. Pick them on a walk this month and freeze them overnight (the modern version of waiting for the first frost) then pack them into a jar with sugar and gin and put it somewhere dark. Eight weeks. Ready for Christmas. The most patient and most rewarding thing September asks of you.
The Harvest Roast: Pork shoulder with apples, low and slow, falling apart by lunchtime, the kitchen smelling of something so good. Or lamb with rosemary from the still-going garden. The kind of Sunday that takes most of the afternoon and makes the whole house feel exactly like it’s supposed to feel in September. Serve it with whatever the garden is still giving, runner beans, the last courgettes, roasted squash, something that feels like autumn has arrived.
Plum Jam: The plums are ready. The jam jars are out. This is the year I actually make it instead of meaning to. Probably.
Tiny Somerset Swaps
Local apples from the farm shop, there will be a dozen varieties you’ve never heard of and every single one of them is worth trying. Don’t buy the ones you recognise. Buy the ones with the handwritten labels.
Somerset cider from a local producer, September is when the new season’s cider thinking begins and the farm shop will have the first bottles.
Blackberries from the hedgerow because the hedgerow is free and the hedgerow ones are infinitely better.
Elderberries from the lane if you can find them, they look like tiny dark purple grapes and they make everything they touch the colour of autumn.
A chicken from the farm shop butcher for the roast, the difference is worth every penny.
Waste-Not Note
Apple windfalls → crumble, baked apples, sauce, frozen for winter — the windfall apple is one of September's great free gifts, lying on the lawn waiting to be useful.
Blackberry excess → jam, fool, frozen for February crumbles that will taste, inexplicably, of this September.
Tomato last gasp → slow-roasted sauce, blitzed and frozen, the taste of August preserved for January pasta.
Herb garden going over → dry what's left, freeze in oil cubes, use the rest in the harvest roast before it's gone entirely.
Sloe gin started → ignore for eight weeks, which is harder than it sounds.
This month you’ll find me …
Forty-one. A new notebook. The first page open.
September always does this to me, makes me feel like the year is starting and I’m standing at the edge of it with everything still possible. I know, I know, technically it’s autumn, technically we’re tipping into the dark half, technically the summer is over. But I don’t feel that. I feel the opposite of that. I feel the unwavering optimism of someone who has just opened a fresh exercise book and not made a single mistake in it yet.
Opening the first page of my new notebook and writing something worth keeping. Not a to-do list. The honest answer to the question September keeps asking. Written down and then acted on.
Turning 41 with considerably more enthusiasm than 21 year old me expected, and considerably more gratitude than I had at 31. Gratitude for the garden, the seasons, the slowing down, the learning to notice. How many of us had mum’s and grandmothers who told us this but we ran full speed into the bright and exciting productive life we were told was totally achievable and sustainable?!?!?
The end of summer declutter, deep clean, windows open, the house breathing again after the summer chaos. More therapeutic than the spring clean, I promise you this. There is something about the September tidy that feels like mental spaciousness made physical.
One meaningful edit to the house, not a haul, not a seasonal refresh, one considered thing. This year mine is a lamp. The right lamp, in the right corner, throwing the right light. That's my September edit.
Replacing the espadrilles with the Wellingtons by the back door. This happens every September and every September it feels like a statement. Summer is over. The Somerset mud is back.
Collecting blackberries. There are pots in the car for the impromptu hedgerow stops. The children know what the car slowing down means. They get out without being asked.
Blackberry and apple crumble. On repeat. Not sorry.
Digging holes and dropping in bulbs; tulips, daffodils, alliums. Trusting the season to deliver them.
Watching the Harvest Moon rise on the 26th, with something warm to drink and somewhere with a clear view east.
Hoping for the Indian summer. Manifesting it daily. Keeping the sunscreen in the bag just in case.
Longer walks on the Somerset footpaths, the hedgerows heavy and dark and entirely worth stopping for, elderberries, conkers, the first colour at the tips of the leaves. Picking up every conker I pass until my pockets full are of them.
Visiting local orchards when the apples are ready, the cider season approaching, the Somerset countryside doing the most beautiful thing she has been building towards all year.
Starting the sloe gin. Picking the berries on a walk, freezing them overnight, packing them into a jar with sugar and gin and hiding it somewhere dark. Eight weeks. December-me will thank September-me.
Feeling, for the first time in a long time, that I know what season I’m in, and I’m glad of it, and I wouldn’t be anywhere else.
September. The real new year. The notebook is open. Anything is possible.
May your blackberries be abundant, your crumble warm, your Harvest Moon golden, and your new notebook full of things worth keeping.
With love, Gemma x
Stay a while …
The Piknic Club
Life is too short for boring picnics.
The Piknic Club is where the blanket-spreading, basket-packing, joy-seeking community lives. Seasonal boxes, curated picks, and the kind of picnic inspiration that makes you want to drop everything and go outside immediately.
Come and be nosey …
The blanket is always out over on Instagram. Behind the scenes Picnicscapes, Somerset life as it actually happens, and the occasional opinion about gingham.
