October

October is, by far, my favorite month … and I swear it’s NOT because my birthday is in October (I mean it doesn’t hurt!)…

But truthfully, I love everything about October: the sudden change in the weather; the crisp morning air, the cool nights; the pumpkins in the fields and the extraordinary beauty that exists on the trees whose leaves change into all shades of spectacular! That I am a red-head makes it easy to love the entire palate of fall! It’s also the first month where I get to pull out my boots and my sweaters and, at the very least, have the sweaters on in the morning! And, hello, who doesn’t love Halloween?

Halloween is a fantastic excuse to get dressed up, become someone/something else; to try something new, spooky, sexy (once, in my twenties, I dressed up as Raggedy Anne “all grown up” – let’s just say there was a lot of cleavage!) … Hey, just testing the boundaries of acceptable dress code.

As a parent, it’s going through multiple iterations of the constantly changing idea of what your child wants to be and, for some of us, sewing until midnight to make the final touches on a costume. But the night of Halloween it’s all about the kids: pizza at the house, then dashing out with a big group of people, cocktails in hand, checking out all the spookily decorated homes who will have spent a small fortune on candy (that all gets thrown away or given to the “switch witch” – more on that another time) as you allow your kids to do something that, under any other normal circumstance would be unacceptable: go to a stranger’s door, ring the doorbell, and beg for food!

I digress …

October is that one month that starts closing down the year … preparing us for all that is to come: Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s. And while those are all lovely holidays, they are holidays that come laden with familial responsibilities, excess consumerism and regrets of all the things you didn’t get done in the current year (sorry that was a little depressing…).

Ahhh, but in October, we are still enjoying Indian Sumer; still letting the sun warm our faces during the day and relishing in spectacular sunsets at night. We are blissfully languishing in the idea that we still have so much time before the end of the year and in full denial that we have to turn our clocks back an hour. It’s tricky that October, but I still love it for all that it brings.

I am not alone in my love affair with October … nor do I want to be!