October Skies

The skies have been nice lately. I don’t know if It’s just that I am looking up more than normal, or if it is just me getting excited to having something other than the blank blue canvas of the summer sky to look at, or if the skies really have been more dynamic of late. Whatever the case, they have been nice. Big billowy clouds erupting from the horizon and holding over the fields of ripening pumpkins and the flatter clouds of evening breaking apart in the oarnge sky.
I like this time of the year. It feels like youth to me. It reminds me of 1998. I think in 1998 it may have been the first time I walked outside and smelled the smell of leaves and ice water and said "This is what October smells like." It was also 1998 when I really began to wake up as a human and experience life without the filter of parental dogma. Not in the sense that there was a dramatic parting from my parents or anything else, but I think it was then that I saw the cracks in their surface and their humanity shone through. I think that I loved them all the more for it, but I realized that they could be fundamentally wrong and instead of forces they became people.
I like driving around Orting and the rural remnants of this area to look at fields of corn and pumpkins and the general buzz of agricultural harvest time. It’s nice to see places where food is still plucked from the ground or a tree. It’s easy to forget that it doesn’t just spring up from watered bins in the produce section.
I suppose the beauty of October and my fondness for it is also a kind of deep breath before November. November marks the beginning of my yearly tradition (now spanning a decade) of self imposed torture. If October is when I bath in the warm sun of nostalgia, November is it’s twilight, where I begin to count the regrets and measure my life in failures and unaccomplished goals. I start to see moments in the past where with just a little bit of insight, I could have changed my reality. I like to sit and let my wander about what would have changed, like in the Butterfly Effect. I know it’s’ all useless, but it’s a masochistic ritual that I need to go through. It will all peak in early December, when I will have allowed myself to sink far enough into a hole of self loathing, regret and self pity, that I’ll be able to convince myself that I’ve paid my pittance for the year and then go back to life.
I really like October. I’m building fence right now. I’m glad I’m not doing it in the sun or heat. A sunny October day with some wind is the best time to work outside. Moving keeps you warm and the wind knocking the leaves around adds for a little drama. The fence is looking good and is almost done. I think I’ll build the last significant run of it this weekend. I like knowing that I’m building the barrier between my home and the rest of the world that will sit for the next twenty years or so. That’s wild. Twenty years. When was I allowed to start thinking in those kind of time spans.