As we tip over into autumn, Kirsteen McNish surveys the dill and the dancing light.

The wasps feel angry now, busying themselves like pointed fingers on a drunken night out, bobbing over dusky fruit and a crumpled apple juice carton as soon as I open the kitchen windows. I try not to enrage them, choosing to give them the side eye instead, pausing before choosing an orange. Silver mists push smoky plumed light across the fields, leaving a door ajar to autumn, and I have a strong urge to push through it — relieved that the sleep-inducing humidity has gone. Things feel diaphanous and suspended. In town at the beginning of the week I spontaneously seek counsel by having my tarot read in a green room with a green carpet by a man whose face doesn’t look like Beckett’s, but reminds me of him nevertheless. His pupils are pinned in the light streaming through the window. Eyes like pale sea glass. He talks quietly as the last of the tourists are drifting by the window, their chins upturned to the medieval architecture; others on their way to work, heads down, clutching vaporous coffees. I don’t tell my partner where I am as I know he will undoubtedly roll his eyes. As the reader turns up the second card, he says that to keep repeating something when it’s not working is a kind of madness. He turns another and suggests I keep my ideas close to my chest. I smile. Knowing when to quit has always been a hard one. Enthusiastic oversharing another weakness. I suddenly think of the divorce statistics I read somewhere. If the statistics are one in two for regular couples in long-term arrangements, what must they be they for parents of children with SEN challenges? Inevitable? My thoughts turn quickly to my partner’s elegant hands and how he turns the wheel of the car, drives a mattock into the earth, or how he rubs my daughter’s head when she is overtired — and in doing so I push all other bruised thoughts away into the distant hills. 

My socks cling cold to my feet, wet from the early morning grass creeping through the stippled cracked brown leather. Autumn is pressing watery mountain ridges against the windowpanes and I welcome the thought of retrieving wool jumpers. The freckles that once raced across my nose like a murmuration are evident only in old school photographs: soon after I would ghost the hot sun as a teen, our romance never to be re-kindled. Autumn is when I really feel myself, all other seasons wan in comparison. Peaty, musky smells will soon emanate everywhere. As I walk up to the hilltop bench, my shins and calves become so saturated against the grasses and pink clover, it’s as if I have drifted into a stream. I want to say that being here, alone, is akin to love, but love fluctuates — this feeling is a constant, running still and deep. 

I watch as the light does its thing, seeping across the valley. Trees cast creeping fingers of shadows on the pink and yellow hills, and the mustard ridges of harvest tyre tracks snake and coil like an aerial view of a labyrinth. As I get up too quickly, I knock over a thermal cup on the bench and the coffee sloshes around and all over the sides like a boat alighted into in a squall. In that split second I realise what it must be like to be a two-year-old — the noise is compelling, with a sudden cause-and-effect pleasure catching in the back of the throat. I think of my now 15-year-old daughter; that she would undoubtedly try and repeat the same action because of this satisfying auditory sensation. To create wonder. To see how things seep, the mistake unimportant. The prism I look thorough has forever been changed by my daughter in these fleeting moments. I just can’t see things like I used to. 

The past seven weeks I have had some paid for help with our daughter over the holidays, for the first time since we moved to Devon. It feels bright and heady. She intuits the impending departure to the aquarium, dancing in the kitchen and pushing me out of the way when I try to give her a kiss goodbye. I hand the bag with all she needs to her enabler, my gaze distracted by the dropping flowers in yellowing water on the windowsill. I am grateful she knows this woman already from school — someone whose own grown brother has the same disabilities. A strange word I thought, when I signed the forms giving them responsibility. En-ab-ler. The sound of it on your tongue — as clunky as Lego blocks. I hurriedly grab her raincoat, chosen oversized for her small frame in case she drops suddenly from tiredness or sensory overwhelm, and long enough to cover her legs in the wheelchair in a downpour. It drowns her. She grabs the hand of B and the edges of me feel like they are trying to follow her; like fog. All these years I had thought she needed a familiar space, but she has in a way been held in a gilded cage. She is in no less need of change than my own neurotypical urges. My son hangs in the doorway as they drive off. “Okay Mum?”. I ask him if he wants to play a board game, or go for a walk around the lanes together, or maybe to draw. We are as awkward in this moment as separating lovers, his hands stuffed deep in his pockets. “I’ll think about it” he says as he looks downwards and shuffles off, hood pulled over his eyes.  I feel something smarting I can’t quite place. He doesn’t take me up on this offer an hour later either, and I worry that too much time has passed.  To have time, after too little time, feels alien in this strangely suspended moment. I am over-cheery and can sense he finds my suggestions cringey. The render of our situation has been chipped off, bearing the bones of the brickwork — should we keep peeling it off or cover it up again? I try to make the most of my time to myself as he slopes off to his room to talk to his friends as they game. I feel laden with fruitful possibilities, and yet I can’t focus on one thing for more than 20 minutes. The light dances outside as Buzzards circle the barns of my neighbours. It begins to rain again.

When my daughter returns, hair damp and happy, my son appears at the door, this time saying he is bored and hasn’t had any time with me. I grit my teeth. In mid-September I will be at The Liverpool Philharmonic with musician Ruby Colley, discussing her groundbreaking experimental project Hello Halo that she has developed with her neurodivergent non-verbal brother Paul. I am learning from Ruby, however uncomfortable this process is at times, of what it is to be a sibling, and to be the one that is often overlooked; how one makes the vibrations heard. She doesn’t feel the need to decode her brother but wishes that his unconventional voice is out there, woven into this score alongside the voices of others that care for him. Its abstract concept of making the unseen seen appeals to me deeply. I am struck that much of the neurotypical world is actually tied to compartmentalisation, and just how much folk really do stay in their lane. And yet here Colley is, determined to unfold an origami box and let the sounds reverberate, not knowing the outcome, and not needing to. I think of so-called boundary-pushing folk that are often just re-grinding the same shared groove. This, to me, is exciting. The blurring of the lens, redrawing perspectives, not neatly packaged.

As I visit the allotment one morning, I notice from afar that the dill that burst forth like a firework in July saw so much harsh weather in August its leggy beauty was hammered into stringy bowed arches, tickling the ground like animal drawing a draft of water. The winds blew violently through the valley, making steel skipping ropes of telegraph wires and creating a wOwOwOw sound like drone samples. In the stickier weeks of June, I shared a stage with writer and chef Olia Hercules to launch the book This Allotment. Olia explained how she had struggled to grow dill, a staple in Ukrainian dishes, in London soil, making her evermore homesick for the family who she is separated from by war. She spoke like a soft song, her fingers interlaced tenderly, and her knuckles whitened as she composed herself. I had a deep want to put my hand over hers. Here, now, I smell the dill’s heady scent on the breeze as I brush against it, working to stop its seeming demise. I have a sudden sensory rush remembering a perfume I once wore that supposedly worked off pheromones and changed according to the wearer’s skin. The person I was then involved with told me it smelt of dill as he pushed his mouth under my hair and hard onto my throat. I remember feeling disappointed despite this attention after weeks of not seeing each other — to smell like a herb used in fish dishes was not the desired effect. Now, pressing its limey yellow starburst of flowers between my fingers, I think it’s one of the headiest, most potent scents I have ever inhaled. My then-lover was forever in the moment, and I was merely caught up in the fool’s dance of trying to make him stay. I must accept that the plant is now dying — strangled almost by the twine I tried to support it with. I crab-step down the slope to release the stalks and they fluff out like a bird’s feathered breast in the cold, releasing a last scent in appreciation. “There you go” I catch myself saying, and I suddenly want to jump the hedges and keep walking into the woods beyond. 

I hear the sound of pollinators burring, making use of the late-flowering wildflowers we sewed, and crickets clicking like morse code in the nettles; the “Hooooooe” cry of the sheep farmer down the hill. Everything is in conversation, and quiet dialogue at that — every sound has a place. No silos here. I pick a few tender veg and carry them back in the crook of my arm. I have the overwhelming feeling that want to see my Dad as I put these offerings in the sink, having only seen him once since my Mum’s funeral two years ago. When I was younger, he said he could tell it was his eldest (me) going down the stairs in the morning as he would hear my knees click and snap, my bones painfully outgrowing my muscles. Now at 87 he reluctantly admits it’s time to stop scouting for the premier football team he works for, as his own knee needs an operation. He resents the walking stick he is having to use and still wears his team’s emblemed jacket, keys jangling in his pocket like a prison warden. He tells me he needs to finally get on and finish the book he is writing. I hope I have inherited his genes and thirst for life and not the ones that allowed disease, and things beside, to swallow my mother whole.

Over the embers of summer, the bank sends us letters that leave us feeling mugged — no room for losing income, they have their quotas to fill. They want their overdraft back. We light bonfires and glasses of wine stain our lips and loosen our inner tensions, a paper chain of friends making the ground feel somehow less swampy.  I scroll my phone aimlessly for a few moments in the heat of the fire and feel keenly that the world is in a state of mourning. Amongst all this an ad says “Want to know who is stalking your profile? Click Here!”. My stomach lurches incredulously at something created to appeal to deepest vanities and a need to create shame when surely we should be in the construction business — supporting others. 

In these ebbing away weeks, my late sister’s children and my brother-in-law visit us. As they slip out of the car after a five-hour drive, changed so noticeably, I try so hard not to react my throat buckles and I can’t swallow properly for 2 weeks. After the sudden heat of a sibling row between them two days in, I encourage my nieces to come up the lane with me and we see a dreamlike flash: the Barn Owl flying into the open field. They hold their breaths instead of their phones as they watch it swoop and tumble and it all feels filmic and surreal. The earlier argument is now long forgotten. When it imploded, my son looked shocked, evident emotions breaching his throat as his cousins exchanged harsh words. It strikes me suddenly why perhaps peer dynamics have hit him so hard at secondary school – not used to the normal push-pull of sibling rivalry in discovering one’s own mettle, and not as self-certain as a single child. I ache as we wave the kids and my brother-in-law off 3 days later, a series of stinging papercuts as the car disappears over the dusty single-track road. I feel apart from them. Feeling apart is too familiar a feeling. 

This evening, as I languish in bed with the searing hot fevers of a bout of Covid, the milky white breast of the Harvest Moon slides into view, bright and welcome. Are they all Supermoons these days? 

I realise, now, lying here, I am in the process of a kind of slow reclamation.