For those like me, who live in the northern hemisphere, it might seem a touch perverse to post a photo of autumn leaves just as summer is expected. But then, of course, so many fellow bloggers south of the equator are heading into winter, so this is for you. Seasons greetings and all that.

Besides which, here in the UK most of us have been having autumn, if not downright winter weather for weeks now. June arrived with Met Office warnings of gales, plus torrential downpours. As I write,  the sky is filling again with fat rain clouds…

Enough already. Feelings of dryness are definitely required at Sheinton Street. I anyway love the spicy scent of autumn leaves, and especially crispy sweet chestnut ones, which these mostly are.

There is something mesmerizing about that sundried smell that opens up pathways to the past: forgotten houses, empty rooms, sun bleached floorboards, old cupboards and drawers exhaling remnant whiffs of their former contents, the sweet odour of decay. It’s all most beguiling, and hard to know if these are shreds of a remembered past, or some parallel universe barely glimpsed. Shall we take a ‘leaf’ from Alice Through the Looking Glass, and step through…?

Perhaps another day. The leaves are Welsh ones by the way. There were caught last year on a gloriously dry September afternoon, as we walked in a dream on the Dol Idris Path below the great  mountain of Cader Idris.  You can read about that walk here.

But now for the soundtrack to the photo, a song that I’ve loved since my first years on the planet Autumn Leaves/ Les feuilles mortes  sung here by the one and only Yves Montand. Oh, the tristesse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRJn0hnIyyc

Related: Now that summer’s done, we take the Dol Idris Path…

Jennifer Nichole Wells OWPC: dry   Go here for some more dry posts