Good morning, and welcome to October

Good morning, as I said, and welcome, as I said, to October. We’re delighted to have you here in this tenth month of the year, which your hand will insist on writing as the eighth month at least two out of five times you try it, because of that pesky ‘Oct.’ I mean just look at it.

Thanks, Romans.

Welcome to the month that, in your history, really screams “fall.” September is all about back-to-school; there’s too much going on, too much dread and summer’s-ending, to feel the crispness coming. October — now there’s fall if I ever saw it. (I did, ever see it, that is. Many times. Sometimes, now, I wonder if I will again.) It’s been your favorite for a long time. The month Halloween is in. The month for stomping through piles of leaves, then getting yelled at because don’t you know there’s ticks in there? The month of fragile, sharp-edged sunsets, too soon.

When you’re older, you’ll find yourself rejuvenated in October, the cooler air bringing you to your senses, Orion rising in the evenings, the sap rising in you the way it does for most people in spring. You’ll start romances with people born in October, a procession of Libras and early Scorpios, like your parents, like you. It won’t always go well.

Your mother was born in October, and you haven’t bought her a card yet, but then she hasn’t called you in months, so it’s easy to forget. You haven’t called her either, so at least you have that in common.

October is the last burst before closing in, the bonfires that herald the cold, the waiting for the first frost. October is walking along a city street next to a park, the sky a deepening quilted gray through which a copper sun peeks, where the trees are making a new sound in the wind, and that wind is also getting up under your sweater a little more. October is a sweater.

October is when your ears start itching more than usual, and your scalp, too, as something in your body decides that as much as it hates trying to breathe in high humidity, it simply can’t keep your skin hydrated when it’s like this. Do try and understand.

If history is any indication, you’ll probably get sick in October, after doing something fun.

October stares at you down the barrel of winter, wearing a witch hat, sipping a pumpkin spice latte, and laughing.

In Canada, the decorative pumpkins and the sugar pumpkins are on the shelves at the same time. In Canada, canned pumpkin shares a rack with the Cadbury mixed packs. It’s Thanksgiving in two weeks, here. Canada knows what side its turkey is buttered on.

October sits by the side of your bed, not at night but early in the morning, sprinkling dreams of internment camps into your itchy ears. Mornings, already a horror, get just a little worse.

When it’s over, November will open like a cemetery gate, all howl and brown, nothing inside it but the long wait for snow and your birthday, on which it will undoubtedly rain.

Once again, welcome. We invite you to enjoy this delicious and most deceptive of all months, its delights and torments, its whispers of depression, its urges to move. Take its chilly hand and go for a walk, won’t you? Smell that air. It may be all that saves you.