OCTOBER COUNTRY

One of the most enticing opening passages of any novel in the library is that with which RAY BRADBURY begins his classic, Something Wicked This Way Comes...

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren't rare. But there be good and bad, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn't begun yet. July, well, July's really fine: there's no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June's best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September's a billion years away.

But you take October, now. School's been on a month and you're riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you'll dump on old man Prickett's porch, or the hairy ape costume you'll wear to the YMCA on the last night of the month. And if it's around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners...

And here are some more words and pictures in praise of the season of autumn and, in particular, this rare month that has already amost blown away with the fallen leaves...

Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter.

- Carol Bishop Hipps

There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October.

- Nathaniel Hawthorne

You ought to know that October is the first Spring month.

- Karel Capek

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

- George Eliot

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

- P D James

Images: © Brian Sibley, 2007