The grass is always greener ... in your imagination

It’s the season of the kitchens. But maybe not the way you think. I mean, it is nominally harvest time, so you might think I’m talking about the sharp smell of cut garlic fresh from the ground, or boiling slick-skinned new potatoes, or the somehow-orange taste and smell of acorn squash, mashed or baked.

You might be thinking I’m going to be going on about fresh apples or pears, or big new onions with their green leaves still attached.

But it’s actually even more esoteric than that. I’m talking about the light, and what appears with the lack of it.

The days are still shortening, the mornings when I walk to work now dark, the darkness creeping earlier in the evenings, too. And this year, like every year, I notice as the light changes and things come into view.

This weekend, with the dark and the wet of fall rain, I realized that it is the time when, passing houses on the sidewalk or the street, the kitchens are suddenly lit bright against the darker outdoors. It’s an annual event, for those who set their clocks by the decline and soon, the rise, of daylight.

Perhaps it’s just human nature, but when I see the warm light of a kitchen through a curtain of wet fall leaves, even for an instant, I can’t help but imagine it’s a better place. Impossibly so — the perfect place, the ideal. I imagine that it’s warm and full of the smells of cooking food, that there aren’t fights over homework, that there aren’t bills to pay or medical emergencies to worry about among family and friends. Neat or messy, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the glimpse, the stuck-in-amber moment of it, the semi-precious stone.

No deaths in the family in that kitchen, the one with the familiar yellow of incandescent bulbs and the styled wooden cabinets so popular from the ’80s; it is, out on the wet street with the fallen leaves stuck face-first on the concrete sidewalk, as though you can smell the beef stew cooking.

Down the hill on a side street, moving as fast as the slash of the sudden rain squall hurrying down the gutter, there are shapes through another lit kitchen and you imagine the oven mitts without even seeing them. The pin-prick of halogen ceiling lights, darker wood cabinets shining with reflected light, a passing glimpse of the sort of full fruit bowl that you have to believe will see half the fruit spoil before it can ever be eaten. Show fruit. A small world poised, because nothing has tipped the apple cart — or even the apple bowl.

Every passing kitchen shines like a beacon, even though it might not be anything of the sort; everyone has their lives, and lives implicitly have their complications, their aches and pains. But not from the outside, glancing in. Snapshots of lives in the process of being lived, and no one takes snapshots of things broken.

Cooking shows — and home building shows, and dramas, and the list goes on — make kitchens, fictional or not, the centre of home life. Social media does, too; you can’t scroll a timeline without coming face to face with a domestic victory. This long table with a family meal, that pie, this renovation, that pristine bottle of fall jelly so clear that it seems to make its own coloured light.

I love autumn kitchen, the unsuspecting lighthouse of the family meal.

It is a variant of that other oftglimpsed window, the one at the peak of the dark days, the living room Christmas tree.

Try it: walking with your imagination. It can do all kinds of good.