Saturday arrives with a sense of pause—a rare stillness between chapters. Yesterday marked my final day in a job that has shaped nearly seven years of routine and rhythm. On Monday, I’ll begin anew, stepping into a role with an outdoor clothing company—a fitting path, perhaps, for someone who has always sought meaning and sanctuary in the wilderness, the wind, the rain, and the turn of the earth. But for now, I drift in the gentle stillness between endings and beginnings. For this brief weekend, I belong nowhere in particular. I am unchained and free.
Carys hesitates at the threshold. The dark mornings make her uneasy; she associates them with the erratic thunder of fireworks that sometimes fracture the stillness of autumn nights. On working days, this means our walks are hurried, shorter and contained. But today we wait for light. When it finally arrives, it spills across the landscape like a slow exhale, and we step out together.
The air carries a new chill—that sharp, clean edge that signals winter’s approach. A cool wind brushes my face, and the sun glances off the wet ground, dazzling and cold. The sky stretches high and wide, streaked with white and pewter-grey clouds. Every so often, the sun slips behind them, and the world turns silver for a moment—light caught in suspension.
Carys is subdued this morning. She moves slowly and quietly, pausing often to listen, to watch, to make sure I am still there, her loyalty woven into each backward glance. Perhaps she is tired, or simply attuned to the hush that has settled over the land. We walk companionably, each absorbed in the quiet presence of the other.
The woodland air is thick with the scent of leaf mould and damp bark. Clusters of cream-coloured fungi rise from the fallen leaves, soft domes of living architecture. The season has turned the ground into a kind of tapestry—russet, gold, and faded brown stitched with threads of green moss.
Carys trots ahead, her passage is written in mud—a trail of pawprints looping through the woodland. Each print is a small testament to her being, pressed softly into the earth, already beginning to blur at the edges. They’ll be gone by tomorrow, washed away by rain or trodden into the path by others, but for this brief moment, they mark her existence—our shared movement through this place. I find something comforting in that—the fleetingness of it, the quiet record of a morning spent together. The land remembers us for only a short while, then folds itself back into stillness, waiting for the next set of prints to appear.
She darts toward the pond, tail wagging, eyes bright. She waits for permission to plunge into the water, her patience trembling on the edge of joy.
The pond lies still, its surface dimpling under the wind, until disturbed by a flotilla of geese gliding toward us, curious and expectant. Their movements carve soft ripples through the mirrored sky, spreading outward in widening circles that catch the shifting light.
A pair of swans push their way through—white, commanding, gliding with the slow grace of monarchs. Their reflection trembles in the rippling grey—sovereigns of this quiet kingdom.
We climb to higher ground just as that familiar grey curtain begins to sweep across the hills, soft and certain. Raindrops fall in gentle succession, tapping the hoods of leaves and the backs of our hands. The path becomes a scatter of shallow puddles, each one mirroring the passing clouds.
As I watch my footing, something glints faintly in the moss—a small coin, half-buried. A 1958 half penny. I turn it over in my hand, its surface dulled by decades of weather. I wonder who last carried it, and how it came to rest here—a quiet relic of another time.
The trees stand barer now, but not lifeless, their dark branches etched against the pale sky like veins through which the season flows. Beneath them, the ground breathes—soft, rain-fed, stirring with the quiet work of roots and worms and unseen things preparing for winter’s long sleep. The air smells of wet leaves and woodsmoke—that gentle, familiar perfume of late autumn. I think about the year behind us, how swiftly it has turned. We’ve walked these same trails through every season, watching the world transform and return to itself. The same paths, always different.
Carys walks close beside me now, her fur darkened with rain, the faintest hints of her breath visible in the cool air. There’s a quiet trust in her nearness, the unspoken rhythm of time spent walking side by side. The world feels hushed—the only sounds are the gentle patter of our steps and the whisper of wind through the trees.
The land hums quietly, alive in its slow transformation. I wonder if she feels it too—that deep, wordless awareness of change—and the comfort it brings to simply walk, to be present, to belong, if only for a while, to the turning of the world.