A sheep: the mascot of changing seasons | Helen Sullivan

Sheep are descended from a ‘mouflon’. Yes (yes!)

The wind is blowing: it is the wind that changes the seasons, hot to cold. It blows and blows until the season knows it is time to sit on its suitcase, overstuffed with things that happened, zip it up and travel to the other side of the world.

Sometimes, the season gets trapped for a week, like a little whirlwind of leaves, or one leaf on a small plant going round and round, or moving in a figure eight: an incantation. You get one last period of very cold or very hot. You are trapped, too, like a sheep in its wool: you are in the present, there is no going forward until the season is on its way.

In Things I Don’t Want to Know, Deborah Levy is carrying her luggage up a steep path on a mountain in Spain. “The smell of wood fired in the stone houses below and the bells on sheep grazing in the mountains and the strange silence that happens in between the bells chiming suddenly made me want to smoke.”

What was natural was hedgerows, hawthorn, skylarks, the chaffinch on the orchard bough. You had never seen these but believed in them with perfect faith [...] Literature had not simply made these things true. It had placed Australia in perpetual, flagrant violation of reality.