Autumn Wanderings and Wonderings

In our little corner of the world lately we’ve been experiencing the most incredible weather. Sunshine! Crunchy leaves! Trees on fire with colour! Autumn – what a show pony. Every year I declare my love for it, then seem to forget, have a mad love affair with Spring and then boom! Autumn does it again. I’m sure there’s a very good reason it is so fleeting too, makes us love it all the more, the tease.

Yesterday I got all carpe diem on myself, grabbed my camera, the dogs, a lead for a possibly wayward Bella and got out into that sunshine. We went for a walk down the driveway, through the paddock, along our little dead-end road and to our mail box. We haven’t really encouraged adventures with Bella beyond our house yard, for the fear of her ‘discovering’ the outside world and her wanting to visit it regularly. But, she was a good girl just bounding along in front, exploring and trotting, not even noticing the nearby cattle or the neighbours inquisitive horses.

We’re nearly finished potato harvest for another year – the end is in sight! The harvester crew are just near our house again, over on the next hill, I gave them a wave and walked on, leaving them to their up-and-back, up-and-back, rhythmic task. The grass which was sown around our little farmhouse is springing up out of the earth, all technicolour green and reaching for that sunshine. These paddocks have had potatoes in them for two or three years (sown down to pasture in the Winter still though) but now it’s time to give them a rest for a few years and let the sheep graze.

This property is not the farm I grew up on, it’s not overly familiar to me, these roads, these trees. I got to thinking that it will be familiar to one little person though, it will become ‘the place’ of someone’s childhood. The big gums, the Narracan creek on our doorstep, the hum of the harvesters over yonder. How lucky are we to live here?