Hello Again!
I have decided to enter this months Judith Heartsong’s friendly ‘Artsy Entry’ Competition again. I so enjoyed visiting all the other entries last month!
I wrote this last year and have since tweaked it so that it falls in to line with the competition requirements.
We had to create an entry using some or all of the words on Judith’s list.
I have used some of the words she provided and have dotted them about my essay for you to find highlighted in blue.
I hope you enjoy the walk as you look for the words on loan from Judith’s list. It is one I take regularly all year round with Nature’s various changes to distract me en-route.
Please note I have copywright on all of my entries so please do not copy or save them to your computer. Thank You.
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An Autumn Walk
by Jeanie Kirkby © 2006-10-07
I see the warmth of summer escaping from the land like a ground oozing wraith.
In the middle distance the lake wears an atmospheric cloud inversion.
Autumn has stepped into the landscape. With a sweep of her cooling hands, she paints the leaves with copper and gold tints.
Flowers shudder in her presence, maraca shaking their seed pods at her feet.
Berries and nuts ripen too, tossing their sun roasted bodies to the ground in their haste to withdraw from the coming winter.
These ‘tumbling’s’ which I find myself crunching underfoot, are as though a jar of pebble-like winter toffees has been spilled and scattered around for all those sleepy hollow creatures to devour; through the lean dark days to come.
Squirrels scamper up their larch ladders, like circus clowns on a tightrope, harvesting cones to add them to their cache of nuts for those rare bleak short days when wakening hungrily from their hibernating torpor.
The swallows have left as a squadron, navigating the European landfalls to their African hunting ground; with its beckoning sun and plentiful flies on the wing. Their summer holiday retreats are still stuck to the eaves of roofs and barns, abandoned for another year.
Skeins of Greylag geese begin to arrive from the Arctic regions to our warmer climes. Airborne in the high stratus thermals for so long their legs have become strangers to them as they land on the marshes. They tumble forward with an undignified nosedive along the margins of the lake.
The wind enters this scene fitfully.
Now and then it tests the fallen leaves for their flap ability; skirmishing with them along the paths and under the trees.
Small whirlwinds suck the leaves from the forest floor spiralling them lightly aloft. Then, just as suddenly, released of this new mode of travel, they skitter like a covey of pheasants at the sound of the hunters gun, change tack again, then glide like goose feathers to the ground.
A window opens up down through my woodland vantage point, showing more of the lake in the distance.
The mist has begun to shift and rise revealing more in its translucency as the day moves on.
I can see that the lake hasn’t escaped from the testing parries of the wind.
Small white horses can be seen rearing southwards, away from the prevailing autumn wind whooping down off the high northern fells which are receding to a vanishing point somewhere beyond Grasmere.
A startling crack of laboured feather like flapping draws my eyes to a pheasant whose feathers camouflaged him so well on the forest floor. Looking up through the trees, a watery sun flickers leaf and branch shadows down through the opaque shafts of light to the golden, crunchy, sloughing carpet beneath.
Here and there amongst the damp detritus of past storms are rotting limbs colonised by mosses which compete with one another so that they almost create their own isomorphism’s. All living in their own chosen microcosm; sharing the nutrients from the fallen skeletons of previous year’s storms.
These limbs are wrapped about, as if for protection, by looping barbed wire-like tendrils of brambles, whilst sentry like nettles ward off my reaching fruit picking fingers.
The trees are not alone in their transformed autumnal attire.
Poking out from under each genus of woodland tree is fungi native only to that species and the nutrients which it releases.
Rust, tan, red, green, blues, blacks, red spotted with white fungi, are all vying for attention as I pass by. Umbrella shapes, phallic, fluted and frilled. There are even some who turn their rims up to show their gill like undersides; as though stood on the same warm air grid as Marilyn Munro in her famous floating dress scene.
They slide slowly into the light, like snails, through previous years of wet mulched leaves, revealing all in their moment of glory; whilst offering their spores to the damp air.
In the surrounding suburban gardens, which I pass on my outward and return journey, nasturtiums are one of the last splashes of vivid colour to offer their faces and leaves to the autumnal shivers. Their long saucer shaped leaf stalks trembling in the wind like the many plates balanced on top of the tall canes of performing jugglers.
Back home, and in the warmth, I look out my window to a spangled shimmer of sun bright water, which breaks the mirrored reflections of the plants and trees protecting our pond from the worst of the elements. Water lily’s slip slithery, skeletal and translucent rotting leaves lower into the dark water, joining the sluggish fish lurking closer to what’s left of the summer’s warmth in the depths.
The rain arrives washing the laurel and rhododendron leaves to a glossy wet slicked greenness. The uncut grass of the lawn has had a last spurt of growth; Foxing the gardener who has put his lawn mower away until next spring.
Its Harvest Festival time and there is much to rejoice in Nature.
Have a lovely day.
Jeanie xx
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