It was a familiar rainy day in the city – musty and stuffy as the incessant dust mixed with raindrops. The clouds’ outcry gave the busy people and the angry cars down the main street a blurred romanticism, as it might usually look if one squinted. And it was strange, that on a day so grey, the road was spattered with sunshine – the yellow taxis and yellow coats which multiply in the rain.
That’s how Vera tried to see it anyway – with Ella floating through her headphones ‘Autumn in New York’ – she could just about live in a constant state of idealising and main-characterfying, and, most importantly, forget about the real shit deal life had handed her. If she ever did stop for a second to think about that then the rain might have misted up her glasses and chilled her back, as she trips and chokes on the dirty air and dirty water while the busy people dissolved into the angry cars and left her lonely behind.
It was this constant motion that made Vera feel sick and resentful - she missed the sweet country air she knew so well. She liked the sounds that came her way to be natural and disparate, to dissipate as soon as they touched her ears, not blat on all afternoon. It was the yellow raincoats scattered about today, that softened her slightly, a reminder of the muddy doggy rainy walks with her grandma, in the hills, where she was supposed to be.
That was the pinnacle of her life it seemed now, and Vera thought defeatedly that nothing would ever match up to her rosy childhood days again. Yes, those days were hard – gruelling, uncompromising, with not the faintest hint of the pastoral idyll you may be thinking of – but they felt right. There was a natural rhythm to farming life and not much got in the way as each season of life and death passed inevitably and more or less on time. Yes, it was the complete lack of time that Vera had a problem with in the city - it never rested, never slept.
Sleeping is what Vera missed most about the countryside – a forgotten part of nature she thought, but in fact what makes everything so magical, the hibernation of the hedgehogs and the bats and the dormice, the chrysalis of the caterpillar, the sleeping trees in the wintertime.
Oh, how Vera loved the seasons – each one lived out in its full glory where she lived with no silencing noise from the roads. Winter with its wood burner fires, spring with its flowering of the bulbs we planted, summer with its trips down to the cool stream and of course Autumn, her favourite or ‘fall’ as Vera is now supposed to call it. It wasn’t just the crunchy crispy leaves, the warm and golden colours, the cold and hazy sunshine, it was the music that came with it. Music – the only thing Vera can take with her to a new cold grey place in its entirety.
Back at home, her grandma would play records, played them for as long as Vera could remember. She played them according to season, ‘Spring is here’, ‘Summertime’, ‘Autumn Leaves’... Always jazz, sometimes folk, blues, rock. The tunes drifted and swayed and sang though their little cottage kitchen and Vera imagined the trees outside swaying too and all creatures humming along softly, like a morning sunrise.
Here, in New York, Vera’s new home of sorts, it was getting near sundown when she heard something strange but familiar – a sweet sort of uncanny which rested on her willing ears and quietened the city’s bleat. Like an unsuspecting rat of Hamlin, Vera followed the sound on instinct to an unassuming shopfront – ‘Verity’s’ it read in rosy swirling letters. It took her by surprise, the sight of her grandma’s name in print – it choked her, not with dust but with painful, aching joy. Pushing open the door, placing one foot inside, almost ceremoniously, Vera found herself running down a glowing staircase, into a hazy warm blanket of smooth jazz. ‘The falling leaves drift by my window… the autumn leaves’…
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