Disorder in the Air

 

I don’t need a calendar to tell me it’s October. There’s a stillness, a softness really, to the days and a gentle magic in the hazy, late afternoon light. There’s melancholy in the air and it wraps itself around everything like a cloud of chiffon. I’ve been expecting it. The trees are beginning to lose their leaves, stretching their soon-to-be bare branches like skeleton fingers across the skies.

Witches and ghosts and goblins and black cats are showing up on front porches and doorsteps all through the neighborhood. Halloween is just two weeks away and in the pre-virus world, every school parking lot and churchyard would soon have a Pumpkin Patch with scarecrows and hay bales and wheelbarrows and little ones trying out colorful trick or treat costumes. This year, though, Halloween is likely to be just one more casualty of the virus. Trick or treat, indeed.

Meanwhile there’s this melancholy. It settles in my bones and makes me feel weepy. It’s sorrow and sadness and regret and the only comfort I can find is knowing that it will pass with November or a sudden cold front, whichever comes first. I’ve never understood it, never been able to figure out why it’s so reliable and precise, like a fifth season. I’ve never had an October without it, not even as a child when I was too young to see it clearly and couldn’t find the words to tell my daddy why I felt so unhappy. I’d thought that this autumn season might be different with the country so uncertain and upside down and – from all I can see – parts of it so determined to self destruct but no. The very first afternoon of October, I glanced out the window and saw how the light was changed and suddenly felt a wave of resignation wash over me. Not even a global pandemic can stand in the way of a determined siege of melancholy.

The oddest thing is that there’s nothing particularly wrong or different or more threatening than there was on the last day of September. It’s annoying to feel so inarticulate and helpless about what is, essentially, a mood, so I trudge on, trusting that time will take care of it and reminding myself that nothing troubles us so much as our own thoughts, disordered and wrong as they may be.