I sat down to work on my column and wrote the following sentence: “I wonder if this is the most beautiful October of my life so far, or I’m just getting better at appreciating it.”
I wrote that, in part, because I was having a hard time getting to work, mostly as a result of the perfect golden afternoon unfolding outside my window. It was cool enough to wear a simple, light sweater, a crisp breeze was singing and yellowed leaves from the cottonwoods in the front yard were swirling gently against the ocean blue sky, illuminated by the warm sunshine. Who could bear to sit in front of a computer screen with such conditions right on the other side of the window pane?
I pretended to work a little longer, but thankfully we had to run out to the ranch to do a few things before supper. I’d only written that one sentence. Meanwhile, despite the beautiful weather, we were all in grumpy moods. Amidst the general grumbling (my own included), I finally said, “I’m walking from here!” even though we were in the middle of the pasture.
I jumped out of the pickup, expecting to soak in the beautiful Octoberiness of the day and be lifted from my crabby mood, but I looked up and realized something had changed. The wind had picked up, and gauzy, gray clouds were moving quickly across the sky. The crisp breeze was now cold, and I was glad I’d grabbed an extra jacket. I let out a long sigh. “I know this feeling,” I thought. “This is the feeling of November.”
The following is a passage I wrote for an essay back in 2017:
“The chokecherry tree that arches over our patio is always the last to change colors and also happens to be the prettiest. Its leaves go from green to yellow, and then finally to a warm, rosy peach. In the waning days of October, the leaves had barely faded but then, in one night, the whole tree changed, and by daybreak was glowing like an autumn sunset. For about 48 hours that tree stood like a graceful reverie, putting on the best show around … That is the beautiful magic of October. By the end of the week, however, high winds had pulled every single leaf from the chokecherry. The tree is just gray, bare branches now, and the porch a drab stretch of gray as well; those petal-pink leaves are brown sludge, drifted around the edges of the concrete. The sun hasn’t shown its face in a few days either, so the whole world is just gray, gray, gray and brown. Poor November. Nobody likes it like October. As the fictional heroine Anne of Green Gables says, ‘I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.’ This sentiment does not apply to November. And can we be blamed? November days are so short, it seems the sun barely peeks out of the eastern horizon before heading back behind the western hills. Plus, we know winter is coming and that there are so very many months of it left.”
The takeaway here: I’ve always been pretty good at appreciating October and equally good at not appreciating November. It suddenly seemed very plausible that my dark mood (and the rest of the family’s, too) was predicting the shift to a darker time.
Oh, October, you aren’t over, but you will be very soon, and I already miss you. Yesterday evening’s gray skies lingered into this morning’s dawn. The kids got dressed for school in semi-darkness. I had to turn on the light over the stove top to scramble the eggs. I won’t try to put a happy spin on it. There’s a time and a place for everything, and that includes a gloomy day and a gloomy mood. All I can say is thank goodness for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, which occur in the right order and at the right time every year without fail.
