The changing of seasons always brings thoughtfulness for me. The bright cool light of Spring and its hopeful blossom, the warmer days of Summer that stretch out with the luxury of later sunsets. And Autumn. It’s been and gone and I miss it already, but it was joyful while it lasted. This is my ode to Autumn, which has always been, and will always remain, the season that lifts me.

Let me put this into context. I grew up in England where the new school year begins in September, just as late summer is starting to give way to crisper air, and when the anticipation of a new classroom holds hands with the turning of the leaves. Add my birthday into this same week, and you can start to understand why instead of being an end, it’s always represented a fresh chapter to me.

And each year, decades and a hemisphere away, Autumn arrives and something in me stirs. Here in Australia, the change happens in March and after twenty years in this place, I still look out of the window and think it’s September. But the sense of possibility remains the same, that back to school feeling stamped into me, becoming part of how I move through time.

The quality of light is the thing I notice first. The new warm tones arrive when the sun sits lower in the sky and has more atmosphere to shine through. Scientifically, it’s because the thickness of the atmosphere scatters the shorter blue light wavelengths but allows the warmer yellow and red to reach us. Poetically, the golden light softens the glare we’ve had all summer and provides a cinematic glow, the backdrop to new plans, combining nostalgia with anticipation.

If there was a good word to describe the smell of the air in Autumn, it would be my favourite word. I suppose the consensus is crisp. But that only describes part of it. In Korea, 상쾌하다 (sangkwehada) comes from characters of fresh/cool and pleasure/pleasant. I like this. In English, there is a word, rummescent, that is a descriptive atmospheric term for the sweet, musky and crisp aroma of Autumn, capturing both the scent and the experience of being out in nature. It has the right meaning, but I wonder whether it should be a prettier word? Perhaps I will invent one of my own that adequately sums it up: It is crisp in a way that has nothing to do with cold. It is the particular sharpness of leaves beginning their slow return to earth, of wood smoke drifting from somewhere you can’t locate, of the air itself contracting slightly as the warmth leaves it. It is the smell of time changing, of one thing ending and another gathering itself quietly to begin.

Back to school means new stationery, the particular pleasure of a notebook that hasn’t been written in yet, and the anticipation of the fresh thoughts that will populate those pages. It always makes me think of Oxford libraries and their stacks, the Autumn palette of parchment and leather, contained in a Sandstone coat that glows yellow. Knowledge and warmth and the smell of old paper and the sense that good thinking happens here.

We all make plans in January, but mine often come in Autumn, with the new chapter and the feeling that something is about to begin.

I am, unapologetically, a knitwear person. And when Autumn arrives, I treasure the moment that I can carefully unwrap a loved cashmere jumper from its archive tissue paper and put it on without overheating. It’s one of my joys. The shops are full of new collections of enveloping coats and heavier fabrics and it all feels like a return to weight and warmth and the particular pleasure of being properly dressed for the cooler days.

Let’s talk about Autumn colour here. They’re not for everyone - few of us can get away with wearing warm yellow and copper. But Slightly’s core colours of soft vermilion, chocolate ink and parchment were chosen from this world.

Autumn expects you to be paying attention, because the change comes gradually and then all at once and if you are not watching you will miss the exact moment the season arrives. New routines form gently, without announcement, under the particular softness that settles over everything.

And then, almost overnight, it’s over. The rains arrive, stripping the last of the leaves from the trees, the nights draw in and the last warmth disappears.

I find autumn asks me to slow down and look more carefully at the world. To appreciate what is passing and what is arriving simultaneously. To hold both at once.

Which is, in the end, the art of nuance.

And perhaps why this season has always felt so completely mine.

If you enjoyed this story, you can find more on Slightly's Substack, Slightly Contrary 

SLIGHTLY CONTRARY