October is Loss, and Sunshine
A month is a drop of time, and October is the most mortal drop of all.
I have one or two magical memories of winter. The one that bubbles up most frequently is the blizzard that left a snowfall so deep, it was higher than my head. I must have been nine or ten. I remember my mother somehow managed to shovel the path that led from our door to the road. As I walked along it, and ran my fingertips along the wall of snow, I briefly had a sense of what it might be like inside an igloo.
But I run cold, and have no love for the winter. As the planet warms, I actually feel guilt for my resentment of the coldest months. I don’t want to feel a sense of relief, at the thought that I might be spared from the cruel edge of winter. But I do.
I know, abstractly, that October is the gateway to winter. But I never think of it that way. Instead, in my imagination, October is its own singular and pristine moment in the year, a golden month without equal. I might not mourn the loss of winters. but I would mourn the loss of October. I mourn it in anticipation, sometimes. I need whatever change it is that happens in October, whatever shift it is that October marks in the cyclical order of things.
I’m not one of those people who gets into fall. I don’t particularly care for cinnamon, and pumpkin pie is only barely palatable to me. I’m never excited to pull out warm sweaters. Instead, they depress me. My love for October is something other than a love for the fall. It’s just a love for pure October.
What is it, this love of October? I want to say that it’s the image of October, my October imaginary: clear blue skies, a bright sunshine that feels gentle on the skin, a soft yellow that surges into powerful red before fading in abandonment of the trees. I want to say that I love October because it harbors a particular form of gold and sunshine. But I know that this isn’t exactly, or exclusively, what October is.
When I first learned that my husband hates October, I was a little unsettled. It was one of those early, shocking, revelations that you experience in a relationship. But he has his reasons, and I understand them abstractly. Nevertheless, I remember feeling a sense of disbelief that anyone could hate October. Whenever he hates October I find myself wanting to say, “you’re thinking about November.” But I bite my tongue. We each live our Octobers differently, don’t we?
I think the weather we were born into affects us more deeply than we tend to acknowledge. The weather we first entered is the all embracing form of spacetime that served as our initial condition. It’s a new origin story, once we’ve emerged from our origins. It’s the first sort of sunshine, the first sort of wind that our skin ever knew. If astrology is about anything, to me, it’s about this: an acknowledgement that the state of the weather at the moment we tore into the spacetime of earth, as a singular being in the flesh, continues to influence us as long as our body lives. I was born almost in the center of October—on the same day as Hannah Arendt, just narrowly missing the birthday of Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault. So I think this gives me a territorial sense of October: as if October is mine, as if I belong to October, and October belongs to me.
But I’ve learned to think about October differently. And I see more loss in October, now. This week I walked through my garden and I had to look closer, to see what’s alive. Everything that was blooming, not long ago, is dead. There is a sadness to the trees, in late October. They’re growing lonelier. And I can feel their loss. October is a change, it’s a shift in the conditions of existence. It’s a foreboding. It’s a time when, if we’re paying attention, we can feel very mortal.
Poets love to write about the months of the year. It makes sense, doesn’t it? A month is a unit of time that expresses change in such a concrete and material way. Each month encloses us, enfolds us, and touches us in a particular way. Each month has so many images, so many memories. Each month activates our senses and our emotions in such a concrete way. Each month is a unique set of patterns that are pressed into our collective experience. Do we all live our Octobers differently, or is there something shared, in the way we live an October?
The poet May Swenson captured both the loss and the sunshine of October. She invoked October through “wet tousled yellow leaves”, or “knuckles of rain on the roof”. She saw the gray sogginess of October that I always ignore, in my dream imaginary of it. But she also saw its particular form of light: “light that’s sucked into the eye, warming the brain with wires of color.” It is, she wrote, a “warm milk of light, though from an aging breast.”
There’s a melancholy to October, in her accounting. A sweetness and a sadness. In one section of the poem she’s getting a haircut, and the phrase that takes shape inside of her head is, “the very hairs of your head are numbered.” It’s a reference to the Gospel according to Luke. “Even the hairs of your head are all numbered,” the text reads, then offering the (cruel?) reassurance: “do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.” Perhaps this act of numbering hairs, both to measure our value and to humble us, is a reference to Psalm 90: “teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.”
Counting our days (and our hairs) is a ritual act.
Counting our days is what we do, when we need to live through something, when we need to remind ourselves that things end. That nothing lasts forever. It’s why we see tally marks on prison walls. Counting our days is an act of survival: how we assure ourselves that we can live through something. It’s part of our mortality, in that way. And this is the difficult part, the saddest part, of mortality: it points to limits, to difficulty, to the expiration of time that we both dread and hope for.
But there’s a warmth and a glow and a certain kind of power, in the ritual act of counting our days. It’s a way of accounting for the wild and incredulous fact that we could have accumulated so many of them, these days. That they could have all been so different, and yet so strangely the same. It’s a way of recalling the measureless joys that have exploded within these little drops of time, these days. This is the other part, the honeyed flavor, of mortality.
A month is a unit of counted days. One that was built around the face of the moon. A month is a full dose of the moon, from all of its different directions. A month is the time it takes for the moon to face us directly, once again. A drop of time that we’ve spent with the moon.
October is its own sort of drop of time. Maybe what I love, when I love October, is its strange and sweet melancholy. It’s the feeling of my numbered hairs, exposed to the gentle light of the fading sun. It’s the crunch of dry leaves, the sound of a fragility more delicate than breaking glass: a sound that fades quickly, before the leaves are welcomed back into the soil to do the good work of decay.
Next week I’m on fall break, so I’m giving myself the gift of some aimless time spent reading. You probably won’t hear from me! I hope you find an occasion to luxuriate in early October.