Quinces and quietude

Autumn.

Ah, autumn. Here you are again.

I love autumn, even though it comes with a touch of dread - winter, as they say, is coming, and I am fundamentally unsuited to days and days of grey skies and little light.

Autumn is much better. There are squalls and grey days, but they’re more piquant flavouring than the main course. In Ōtautahi, we get bright blue skies and thick drifts of dry leaves, just right for crunching. Then there’s the harvest explosion of fruit: apples, pears, feijoa, quinces and figs, some to be eaten raw, some to be baked, and some to be stored against the cold months to come.

I’ve got quinces on the stove as I write this, which I received third-hand (donated by a friend, who had them from a friend). They are poaching gently, slowly turning a gorgeous ruby. I’m going to make them into… something. Maybe a tart, maybe a sour-cream upside down cake, maybe just stew them down for porridge sweetening. I’m not sure yet. But it’s the time for transformation, for quinces, and for me.

I can feel myself turning inwards, finding comfort and grace from the familiar transitional rituals. It’s time to put away the summer duvet and pull out the electric blanket; time to switch from ice-cold martinis to Irish coffee; time to stop pretending I’m going to sew all the flimsy cottons in my fabric stash and time to start pretending I’m going to sew all the sturdy wools in my fabric stash.

Being Basic

It’s true that loving autumn is basic, and that I am, most definitely, a basic bitch.

Being basic, as far as I can tell, mostly comprises liking things that are popular because they are pleasant and unchallenging, like scented candles (yes), pumpkin pie spices (yes) and scarves (yes).

I have come to terms with this, for I am a white woman named Karen. While I have sworn to never use my managerial-speaking skills for evil, being a basic bitch was always going to be my destiny. I’m not terribly worried about liking things that I like, and I believe everything worth saying on the subject has been said by College Humor’s Sir John Doe, the Normal Knight.

Do I like things that are not considered basic? Sure! Life’s a big pile of multi-coloured leaves. But I would always rather pick up a Julia Quinn than a Jonathan Franzen, and that’s not because I’m not capable of ~appreciating literature~. It’s because one writes books that are fun and make me feel good, and the other writes books that are stylistically impressive but fretfully neurotic and make me want to roll my eyes at everyone in the world, but especially Jonathan Franzen.

(Also, Quinn writes sex scenes that are actually sexy.)

The go-to basic autumnal poetry reference is Keats’ “Ode to Autumn” with its “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, but to me, there’s nothing mellow about the sharp bite of the air. What goes through my mind, as I pick my way through the green zone along the river, searching for the last apples, are these lines from Robert Frost’s “My November Guest”:

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
    Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
    She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Sorrow isn’t here yet for me, but autumn is a reminder of her inevitable arrival. Autumn is life and death and a celebration in the beauty of both.

SPEAKING OF LIFE AND DEATH1 AND BEAUTY, please pre-order my modern day workplace reimagining of the Hades and Persephone myth, Persephone in Bloom!

Later this week, I will be giving subscribers a WHOLE FREE NOVELETTE, and explaining in greater detail why pre-ordering is so vitally important to my book's success. But if you pre-order NOW, you can smugly nod to yourself and say, “yes, I suspected so. That’s why I’ve already done it!”

And sure, feeling smug is pretty basic. That’s why it’s fun.