Each day, I walk a little way down the empty, dirty backstreet of my terraced neighbourhood to get some air, past patched-up fences, peeling garages and wheelie bins, my unsteady legs helped by the slow turn of my rollator. My eyes are usually on the sky, on the starlings that gather on the TV aerials and the swirling turns of pigeons that circle the old factory roofs, but lately I’ve had a new treat to steer towards and my eyes are down low, my pace quicker, eager.
We don’t have many trees here, but what we do have are common limes. They push their way out of scrubby patches of spare land, draping themselves over the pavements, and it’s thanks to them that I seem to have got a rich taste of autumn before almost everyone else. As soon as September arrived, they were straight out the starting gate, the ground below them quickly filling with crisp, curled leaves. It’s this inviting heap I now steer towards, a child again.
It is, admittedly, a deceptive display. Lime trees seem to turn yellow and drop earlier than most, but their autumn piles are bolstered by thousands of discarded pale and papery bracts – the common lime’s secondary, specialised leaves that act like umbrellas to its sweet summer flowers and that now hold the hard, pea-like seeds on a thin stalk. Come early autumn, they dry out first and drop, leaves and seeds all, to create these great, whispering drifts that catch in the breeze to be carried and sprout in the gutters.
I am grateful for the lime trees’ early autumn show because my feet have been impatient and longing for this, for the rustling delight of shuffling my way through one of the year’s best sensory pleasures. It’s the first time in a decade that I’ve been well enough to walk this far – for many years I was unable to walk at all; it was worth every hour of physiotherapy just to get to do this again – to kick and crunch and shimmy in the lime leaves – and I smile the whole way home.
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