Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
Autumn never meant much to me until this last couple of weeks. It just wasn’t summer any more, or I couldn’t wait for Christmas, and for most of my life it’s just been the first few months of the school year, a settling-in period. Life doesn’t start ‘til it’s nearly Christmas, and then it’s the new year. Real life.
But this year I noticed it.
Maybe because it’s the first one I’ve experienced in 4 years. Autumn doesn’t mean as much in north Vietnam, even though it’s the one time of the year where the weather actually fits the pleasant sub-tropical bill that you’d dream of when moving there. Not too hot, like summer, when it’s too hot to go outside. And there’s a couple of months of winter at the start of each year which is grey, damp, cold, and in a word: ‘bleak’.
“The humidity is the killer.”
It absolutely is.
Americans use the same word to describe those extremely hot, dead, muggy days as we do to describe those freezing cold, wet, windy days: miserable. Misery comes in different forms. Wetness seems to be common to them.
Autumn in Hanoi is the one time of year you generally get truly beautiful weather. Still hot but a bit less so; less humidity in the air (the killer, don’t you know), you can appreciate it in all its laid-back, sub-tropical charm, where everything happens outdoors whether it’s the summer and it’s far too hot, or the couple of months of winter where it’s far too cold. Autumn is just right.
This year the colours were the first thing I noticed.
Everyone goes on about the colours of autumn, of course.
They’re talking about the trees, usually. In autumn they seem to spring into high definition, not just the leaves but the trunks and the bark as well, and when the leaves drop they expose their role as the earth’s lungs with the glorious bronchioles of the branches and twigs, set against the pale blue and purple skies, gently interrupted by wisps of the first smokes coming from the chimneys you’d stopped noticing over the summer.
The trees are great for bringing even the grey and brown city-scape of Dublin to life.
But it’s not just the trees and the colours of the leaves.
The sun drops in the sky too, and we’re reminded that despite its depiction as a mostly yellow, orange or golden device with similarly coloured output, without it we wouldn’t have any of the other colours. So too with shadows, which come to life in themselves and in doing so make the parts soaked in light all the more vibrant.
Vietnam does get that golden hour, a three-hour sunset where the combination of light and shadows and the mountainous topography makes everything look like it’s four-dimensional, like the roads are entering the landscape in ways you couldn’t when the sun is high in the sky, until it’s five o’clock and it’s dark before you know it.
I’d never really noticed the angle of the sun before, or maybe I’d just never cared about it.
The leaves fall more and more. A big dirty rain pounds them and smushes them ‘til they look like bits of flattened dog shit, soggy and offensive. Then a cold snap comes and they dry out. The piles build and build until you can’t see your shoes anymore, and then one morning they’re gone.
Bits of the landscaped you’d stopped noticing while the sun was high in the sky come back into focus, and your attention is snapped back into the present by the new light and the first snapping fingers of ‘proper’ cold.
You notice the first ‘proper’ cold day of the year, or at least the latter half of it, all of the sins of last winter being forgotten about in favour of the new autumn/winter offerings, to coincide with the new school and Premiership years.
The cold has a distinctive smell to it, and not just the smell of the terminally diagnosed turf-fires of pre-Christmas-card rural Ireland. The synaesthesia comes from this overlapping of the stronger, more defined sensory elements of summer and winter; each defined by their tendency towards heat and cold, spring and autumn defined more by their absence or the awaiting of the other. This cyclical season is like a bridge between times.
“That’s the hardiest weather we’ve gotten this year so far now,” a guy announces to me in the petrol station in Sligo. That’s it.
On a frosty November morning, everywhere looks like a village.
We’re lucky to be from a country that has seasons. And that enjoys such considerable and remarkable lengthening – and shortening – of the days.
Imagine being from the tropics? You wouldn’t know one day from the next, or your arse from your elbow. What a privilege to get to experience the jetlag of an October Bank Holiday, particularly apparent when Halloween falls midweek, when there seems to be an hour missing from every day of the following week, not just the one on the bank holiday, and the week itself is missing a day. I wasn’t the only one disoriented by it.
Still, right now feels like its own time.
Time feels like it accelerates at this time of year, like it’s building towards the end of the year. Maybe it’s the shortening of the days. You could just say they’re cosier. You can’t have the longer days without the shorter days. And we don’t know how lucky we are to have those long days. Sure by Christmas day you can start talking about the grand stretch again.
Some people stay off the drink for November. I hadn’t really thought about it that much. Maybe. Sure there’s no point writing off a whole month either way.
I’ve managed to avoid most of the Christmas ads and shopping and excitement so far. I do love Christmas, but December can wait. I’m in no rush for November to be over. I’d never noticed it before.