Falling Leaves

If I am truly honest, my favourite season is whichever one it is right now. In the winter I keep an anxious look out for snow and revel in it if it arrives, I enjoy the nip of the early mornings, the need to wear hat and mittens and the cozy feeling when it starts to get dark at 4 and you can see the office lights shining out into the darkness and the fairy lights strung up in the trees around Birmingham.

In the spring there is the series of firsts; first snowdrop, first daffodil, first tulip, first day without a coat, possibly even first day in sandals. For summer, and I mean real summer, not the washed out excuse for a swimming cozzie we had this year, I love the smell of hot sun cream on tanned skin, cool breezy evenings, the crash of surf around my ears during the first swim of the season, birthdays and vanilla sponge cake.

At the moment of course, my favourite is Autumn. I know this because I'm wearing orange. Again. Autumn is all about crisp mornings, the first frost, wearing socks again (I stopped in May), particularly all the socks I made over the summer, favourite jumpers and cardigans coming out of the bottom drawer, and peerless sunny days with trees flaming copper against a deep blue sky.

We look out onto a deep brick red wall only a couple of metres away, five floors above a little alley. At one end of the alley is the churchyard and every now and then my eye is caught by a flash of green and yellow skittering past my window as the trees wave farewell to summer.

It really isn't that much of a surprise then to discover that my knitting matches the season:

These knitted diamonds are part of something much bigger which has yet to be revealed so for the moment, they are falling leaves, dropping from my needles and catching round my ankles, waiting to be swept up to be made into something special.