Octover (for October)

October's just begun, but it feels like it will soon be over. This is a bittersweet time of year in upstate New York, as we desperately try to soak up the waning warmth of an "Indian Summer" (those few sputteringly summery days scattered here and there, like gifts, amongst the growing cold and damp) and start hunkering down for the long winter. The leaves falling faster and faster from the trees look like the quickly flipping pages of a calendar connoting the rapid passage of time. My favorite color is yellow, which seems to suggest both cheerfulness and agedness. Slavs call October "yellow month" and the official flower of October is calendula. Like the Halloween jack-o'-lantern, these help to brighten the otherwise darkening skies and sometimes gloomy moods associated with this month. There were 11 examples of Octover in OhioLINK today, and 197 in WorldCat.

(Le mois d'octobre, église de Bagnot, France, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid