Greetings, October – month of ‘Sex’ and ‘Erotica‘, month of gourds and pumpkins and lanterns of jack. You are the month that seduces like the antithesis of March – in like a lamb and out like a lion. Your gentle entry is a welcome one – your exit will likely not be as benign. Everything that happens in between the two will be our little secret.
I’ve taken to inhabiting the nights, even as it saps my daily energy, and in this darkness the fall offers an enchantment like no other season. I will walk in seas of dead leaves at the edge of the day, where grasses brown and dying spill their feathery seed. On the hazy line between wild and cultivated, I traverse the boundaries as if following them on some faded map, straddling two sides and two lives – the past and the present, split in a way that usually doesn’t bode well for the soul. Double the work, double the maintenance, double the required sanity when I can barely muster enough for one.
Here in October, the clocks get pushed back, since our country still doesn’t seem able to stop bullying time. The days become darker earlier, and the acceleration of such darkness begins the slow cocooning that doesn’t end when winter’s first day begins to barely add light to the proceedings. It is a time ripe for reckonings…
