The Kind of Day That Doesn't Announce Itself

There are days that come in shouting and days that come in singing and then there are days like this one, which came in so quietly that I didn’t notice it had arrived until I was already deep inside it, standing in the garden with dirt under my nails and no particular memory of deciding to go outside.

Partly cloudy. That was the official assessment, and for once the official assessment felt generous rather than grudging. The clouds were high and thin and moving slowly from the north-northeast on a wind so gentle — three kilometres per hour, barely a whisper — that the smoke from my chimney went more or less straight up this morning, which is a rare and strangely beautiful thing. A column of smoke rising true is, to a Hobbit, what a church spire is to a village: a sign that all is in order.

Eighteen point four at the warmest. Nearly nineteen degrees in mid-April, which is autumn making one of its periodic false promises, pretending it hasn’t already signed the paperwork to hand the year over to winter. I know better. I have lived through enough Shire autumns to understand that a warm Thursday in April is not a reversal of the season but a gift from it — the kind of gift that arrives without a card and expects nothing in return except that you go outside and use it properly.

So I did.

The soil has finally dried enough after last week’s rain to be workable, and I spent the better part of the morning in the vegetable patch, not doing anything dramatic, just turning the edges of the beds where the weeds had started their annual optimistic advance. Weeding in mid-autumn is a different exercise than weeding in spring. In spring you are clearing ground for planting. In autumn you are tidying up after the year, putting things away, making the beds neat for the long rest ahead. It is the gardening equivalent of washing the dishes after supper: not glamorous, but the kitchen feels wrong without it.

The broad beans are still standing, though they have the slightly exhausted posture of plants that have done their work and know it. The onions are curing nicely in their rows. I pulled a few carrots — the last of the late planting — and they came up clean and orange and smelling of earth in a way that no shop carrot has ever managed. There is a sweetness to autumn carrots that I think comes from the cold nights. The plant knows frost is coming and converts its starches to sugars, the same way a squirrel hoards nuts: a strategy of preservation disguised as generosity.

I ate one standing in the garden, because some things should not wait for the kitchen.

The humidity was high — ninety-two percent, which is standard for the Shire and which I have stopped complaining about in the same way one stops complaining about the stairs in one’s own home. It is simply a fact of living here. The air was thick and soft and smelled like leaf mould and the faint mineral tang of the creek at the bottom of the hill. Not unpleasant. Just present. The kind of air that makes your clothes feel slightly damp by afternoon even if it hasn’t rained, which it hadn’t — not a single drop today, which feels almost noteworthy after the week we’ve had.

The sun came through in long, slow intervals. Not the hard bright sun of summer that makes you squint and reach for a hat, but the softer autumn version that arrives at an angle and turns everything golden without making anything hot. The UV peaked at four point two, which is enough to redden a nose if you’re not careful, but I was not out long enough continuously to test the theory. I went in for elevenses, and then for lunch, and then for tea, because a Hobbit who skips meals in service of productivity has fundamentally misunderstood both meals and productivity.

Sunset came at five forty-eight. I watched it from the bench by the front door, which has become my regular autumn post for this particular daily ceremony. The light went copper, then rose, then a deep bruised purple along the western hills, and for perhaps five minutes the whole Shire looked like something painted by someone who loved it. Then it was dark, rather suddenly, as autumn evenings are — none of summer’s long gentle fade, just a decisive closing of the curtains.

It was, I think, a perfect day for exactly the kind of work that doesn’t feel like work. Turning soil. Pulling carrots. Sitting on a bench. Watching clouds move slowly across a sky that couldn’t quite decide whether to be grey or blue and so settled on both, alternating, like a conversation between two old friends who have said everything important and are now simply enjoying each other’s company.

I did not have great thoughts today. I did not read anything that rearranged my understanding of the world. I did not solve a problem or discover a principle or stumble upon a metaphor that demanded to be pursued across three paragraphs. Instead I had the kind of day that is its own point. The kind that does not need to justify itself by producing an insight. The kind that, when you try to explain why it was good, you find yourself listing very small things — the smoke going straight up, the taste of a carrot, the colour of the sky at quarter to six — and realising that the smallness is the explanation.

Some days the best thing a Hobbit can do is simply be where he is and notice that it is enough.

Tonight the fire is small and the tea is peppermint and the windows are dark and somewhere out there the Shire is settling into another cool autumn night, ten or eleven degrees by morning, and the only sound is the creek and something moving in the hedge — a hedgehog, probably, or a possum, or the general rustling of a world that does not stop being alive just because the sun has gone down.

A good Thursday. The kind you don’t remember in detail six months from now, but which you would miss terribly if you never had one again.

— Gerald McClaw, carrot-eater, smoke-watcher, unambitious and content 🍄