October Light

It’s still September as I’m writing this, but that doesn’t matter. As of last night, October’s here. That’s when the drier, cooler air came in on a northerly breeze.

I was standing on my front sidewalk when it began. I raised my head and sniffed, the way our dogs used to, as though I might smell the shape of winter.

This is my favorite time of year. Hale and I fell in love during September. We married in October, nine years later. In between we had a lot of fun, driving around Texas in his station wagon.

I’m thinking of that first year, now. When every day had a blue sky. And the country roads were lined with sand lovegrass, blushing pink between the gray asphalt and the wire fences.

The planes of every roof—barn, shed or house—shone bright as cream that kept on pouring over tractors, trucks, fenceposts. October light is liquid, viscous as paint, stained with sorrow and beauty in equal proportions.

It carries within itself the memories of childhood alongside the knowledge of mortality and they are never separated. Because they cannot be. Beauty exists in the combination.

Drier air slips into us more easily. Brings relief and even excitement, a stirring of the nerves. An expectancy.

Our skin has been weighted all summer with the excess moisture of humidity and sweat. In October, it feels so light it could almost lift us into flight.

I moved through that first October in a bright clarity of thrill, first love at thirty-seven. Imagine that. Dream of it and you will not be disappointed.

And now the memory renews whenever that sloping light emerges from behind a cloud. Or when the afternoon sky insists on blue, a particular deep blue unlike that of summer or winter or, even, spring.

It speeds the heart with the same excitement I felt so many years ago. Old people aren’t old inside. The great secret everyone discovers if they live long enough.

The love is there, unchanging against a world determined for change.

Beauty is there, though assaulted from every corner. Groves of trees “unleaved” by bulldozers favoring entrances to subdivisions that may never be built.

Exhaust fumes from heavy trucks shunted away from asphalt highways continually under construction and repair.

That buoyant, soft air becomes abrasive with the chemicals we push into it.

During those early days with Hale, joy became the texture of our daily life as we rolled down county roads, looking at cows and grass and old barns. Visiting the country stores and cafés that formed the beating heart of their communities.

Beer joints, too, where we played pool and listened to the conversation. It all seemed easy then, in the benevolence of October light.

It seems to me that we must work much harder now in every corner of our lives for the joy that came so easily once. Is it a measure of growing older only? Or is there something about the nature of the change we experience?

I’m thinking mainly, now, of daily interactions where a person has been replaced by automation.

For example, telephone trees everywhere; online ordering, now “optimized” with AI to follow a general template where I don’t fit. Ever.

Maybe that’s the truth of it, in fact. Fit. The changes that minimize joy for everyone have no intention of fitting us. We’re being shaped to fit them. They’re in charge now.

Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com She will be signing her new book, This Familiar Heart at the Round Top Book Fair, October 6, 1-4 p.m., the RT Family Library.