An October Muse

An October Muse

October comes quietly, as if walking up the old path between the maples where summer’s shadow lingers, stubborn each year. The evenings creep in, hinting at frost. Trees stand like old neighbors near the porch, a little tired, shaking loose their stories, and now flutter in the wind. Leaves let go without protest, drifting down in a slow surrender—a hush before winter speaks. Their colors blaze briefly, but it’s the sort of brightness that leaves you thinking.

The woods are mottled: oranges, reds, browns, and yellows painted by some quiet hand that knows when best to let go. If you stand and listen, the wind tells you the truth—nothing lasts.

It shuffles the leaves into corners and under fences, as if tidying up after a summer that stayed too long. Folks will rake and gather what they can, making order for the sake of order, only for the wind to undo it. Nature, as always, wins the argument—not just by being stubborn, but by never being quite finished.

Soon enough, that whisper at dusk turns sharper and colder. Winter waits just beyond the field, wearing its patience thin, testing the gates. Warmth bows out slowly, and autumn flickers, holding out as long as it dares. All things, it seems, stand somewhere between beginnings and endings—morning and night, laughter and sadness, steady as a wheel.

October asks for and deserves a kind of quiet respect—a nod to age, change, and memory. The month pulls at roots and dreams, like old age in the autumn of life. The bold chase of youth gives way to quiet knowing; every bright day spent throws a longer shadow, and wisdom grows in the frost lines.

The sun, though still climbing high at noon, has lost its zeal. It shines down now as a duty, not a delight, and casts a long shadow even at its height—the kind you trip on. You look at that old stone fence, and the moss seems thicker, while its life fades. It’s no great tragedy, this fading, but a simple fact, plain as the weathered fence post you leaned on last spring and will, hopefully, lean on next.

You see the farmer out, bringing in the last of things. Not hurrying now, though, he’s past the need for haste, just moving slow with a well-trained eye for what’s worth the keeping and what can be left for the turn-under. There’s a certain kind of honesty in a field cleared, showing the true, hard dirt—no longer dressed up in evanescent pretensions of green. The soil doesn’t complain. It just waits.

It makes you think hard on the roads you’ve taken, doesn’t it? Every time you step off a porch and onto a gravel drive, it’s a choice between this way and that. Now, in October, with the air getting so sharp it cuts a little, you realize most paths end up leading to the same clearing, anyway. The difference is just the company you kept along the way and the stories you gather up for the long haul.

We spend a lifetime trying to outsmart the seasons, stacking wood, sealing windows, holding tight to a promise of summer that won’t be kept. But the leaves fall whether we rake ’em or not. The lesson, I reckon, isn’t about fighting the change, but maybe just seeing it through—the same way you finish a hard row of hoeing, not because you enjoy the dust, but because it needs to be done. It gives you a good kind of tired at the day’s end, the kind that lets you sleep easily, knowing you stood your ground. That’s enough. I’m quite sure it’s always been enough, although I’m also quite many would argue that with me.

I count past seasons, measure their passing in fiery hillsides and early snow, in the rare delight of cold mornings when the world seems freshly remade. Even as these old eyes fade, wonder lingers, and my heart keeps a steady beat for what remains.

When a restless wind sends the first snowflakes tumbling my way this year, maybe for just one moment, I’ll be a child again. And then memories will open wide, and I will know, once again, the sweet taste of snow on my tongue and the joy of making snow angels in the backyard.

Like Robert Frost said, sometimes the way forward is just another way home.