There is a conker on the windowsill above the sink.
You did not put it there. You put it there, technically, but you were not the one who chose it. It came home in a mouth, very slightly damp, and was deposited on the kitchen floor with the particular ceremony of a thing that has been carried a long way on purpose. And you could not quite throw it out, so it went on the windowsill, next to the one from last week, and the bit of bark, and the stick that is too short to throw and too important to bin.
Nobody warns you about this part.
They tell you about the chewing and the early mornings and the mud. Nobody tells you that one day you will own a small museum of objects that mean nothing, curated entirely by someone who cannot explain the exhibits.
You have watched the selection process. It is not random, whatever it looks like. There are twenty conkers on the path and only one of them is correct. They test several. They reject most. They find the right one and then they carry it, all the way home, past everything else worth stopping for, with their head held slightly higher than usual because carrying something is serious work and they know it.
And at the door they give it to you.
That is the part. They do not keep it. They found the best thing on the whole walk and the entire point of finding it was to bring it to you.
You say good boy and you take it and you put it down and you fill the kettle and the moment passes in about four seconds, the way most of them do. Then in October you go to wipe the windowsill and there are nine of them lined up, and you sit down on the kitchen floor for a minute, because somewhere in the last few weeks a small creature has been walking around Britain choosing gifts for you.
The autumn ones are the best. Something about the season makes them more industrious. The world starts dropping things and they take it as an invitation. Conkers, acorns, a leaf that was worth having. They come back damp and pleased with themselves and slightly out of breath, and the evenings close in a little more each week, and the walks get shorter and somehow better.
They will do this for years. They will do it until they are grey around the muzzle and the walks are half the length they used to be, and they will still find something on the way home and still bring it to you like it is the first one.
And then one autumn there will not be a new one on the windowsill. And you will not throw the old ones away either.
So keep the conkers. Keep the ridiculous stick. They are not clutter, they are correspondence.
And if this is your dog, the autumn walk is the whole relationship in twenty minutes: out in the cold, doing very little, being handed things. It is worth kitting out properly. Our handmade collars, leads and harnesses are built for exactly these months, and our coats and alpaca jumpers are for the ones who feel the cold on the way back.
One note on the conkers, since we are on the subject. They are genuinely not safe to eat, and autumn has a short list of other things worth walking around. We have written it up in autumn dangers for dogs. Carrying them is fine. Eating them is not.
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