A Turn on the Stairs

An end of summer moment; a turn on the stairs and the house smelled of holiday cottages, damp and breakfasts and sand and unused winters. I was reminded of long-ago holidays and hot days when the nights were already drawing in and the evenings were colder. A strange thing, holidays in August; seeing the season in its entirety summer starts in late May or early June, rumbles through July and August and peters out in September or even these days in early October.

Signs that the season is fading; squashes in the shops, hazelnuts in the lane, swallows feeding frantically and meeting on the telegraph cables over the paddock. It is starting to get dark from about 8pm. It has been wet and unsettled for about a fortnight, but I am hoping for a return to sunny days and a warm dry September.

Landscape and memory note: Pere La Chaise cemetery in late September nearly twenty years ago, a picnic lunch from a Tunisian place in Belleville, eaten just inside the cemetery. My first visit, a dry dusty day, the trees exhausted, dusty, fading. The sense of heat and dust. Dry ground and leaves crumbling to nothing. Blue sky and a sense of silence among the tombs.