Falling leaves

Since we came to this house, the first thing I've done each day is look out of the bedroom window.  From where I sit in bed, I can't see down into the garden, and there are no houses looking back at me; all I can see through the square window, is a patch of sky, framed by tall sycamore and elm trees. Whenever I've woken on a sunny morning, I've watched the branches waving and the leaves dancing in the sunlight like a happy, hippy crowd at a music festival.

It's getting darker in the mornings now, but the early gloom is brightened by pale yellow leaves that have started floating down past the window. The path is strewn with them; it's as though the party is ending and the crowds are leaving the festival to make their way home, dropping their litter as they go.

It's been four months since we moved in; we arrived in time for summer, and now we're welcoming autumn for the first time. As the weeks have passed I've seen the colours come and go - from the flowers and shrubs that were here before us and the new ones we've planted since. I've cut the grass and trimmed the hedges and watched them grow again. We've eaten lunches and dinners at at the picnic bench that came with us from Shoreham, and we've sat chatting over breakfast at the new table and chairs we bought in an end of season sale, just a couple of weeks ago.

Already there are dry leaves caught in the stems of the lavender bushes and floating across the surface of the pond; soon the grass will be covered in a russet and golden coat that I'll delight in crunching through as I walk down the garden.

Time is passing, but it doesn't feel as though the days are slipping away, more that we're building new traditions, taking old memories out of the box and examining them in a new light.