I’ve always loved October, no matter where I’ve lived or traveled. The heat of the summer has ended. The shorter days are crisp and smell of wood smoke. The dying leaves are brilliant in their passing.

Many of the most memorable events of my life have happened in October and some dates have special meaning.  Like October third, when I was scheduled to give birth; when I opened my first photography show; when I lost my father.  My first book was released two days before my father died.  In October.

My husband and I had our first tryst in October. We met up on the north shore of Massachusetts where we encountered a nor’easter, singing sand and a ghost.  It was the tryst that decided our future. Two years later, Grant got down on one knee on the front steps of our home in Atlanta and proposed to me. It was on a Halloween morning, hours before hordes of children walked up those very same steps seeking treats at our door. 

I had gotten married once in October. It was a beautiful fall day in the latter part of the month.  Both of our families were there. The sky was a perfect blue.  But I knew on that day that my marriage wouldn’t last.  We parted ways five years later, after I learned that the child I was supposed to give birth to in October was never going to be born. 

I once fell in love with a hunter.  He gave me an elk tooth to wear on a strip of leather around my neck. I had never loved a hunter before and learned that, in October, non-hunting girlfriends and wives become widows. For in October, hunters become pack animals and are drawn to deer stands in isolated patches of woods and drink around campfires with buddies after the kill.

I went to Atlanta to sell my house there in an October two months after Grant and I had moved to Santa Fe.  I flew into town on the tail end of a tropical depression and made a beeline for the house that had been my home for twenty years.  It had stood virtually empty for two months but the basement still contained a bit of furniture destined to go to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and I noted that the chairs in my backyard were gone.  Before I left Atlanta, I let a friend know that my outside furniture was up for grabs if she knew anyone who wanted it.  Perhaps she had.

I spent the night in the basement with the cat I had given up to my next-door neighbor’s son.  But I couldn’t sleep that night.  I got up early and left the house in the rain and dark to points unknown.

I got lost in southeast Georgia, a hundred miles from home.  It was still early in the morning and I didn’t feel like leaving. I stopped at a small waterworks plant to  find out where I was and where I could stay. I was sent to an unoccupied single-wide behind a chain-link fence where I inexplicably found my very own chairs around a campfire, bearing my cat’s tawny fur. I spent the night in awe.

I left when the hunters showed up the next morning because it was October and it was time for non-hunters to go home.  And, for me, that meant a home that would soon belong to someone else. I would be selling it to a forensic coroner and his wife who didn’t like trees next to the windows because she was afraid of birdsong.   

I later learned that the single-wide belonged to the family of the hunter who had given me the elk tooth decades before. It was one of life’s little ironies.  I also learned that my old love had died in an automobile accident, leaving behind a son and daughter-in-law and a young grandson. They were among the hunters that showed up on that October morning.

Santa Fe is resplendent in October. The sunflowers are dying back but the aspens are in their full golden glory. The air smells of Hatch chiles roasting in big metal drums. My husband and I take our last hikes in the mountains before the snows come.  Young mice occasionally sneak in to entertain the cat.  The house needs maintaining.  The piano needs tuning.  A parade of holidays are coming up. And I think about all that came before and all that’s left to come. 

Because it’s October.