I am a product of October, maybe thats why do so love the month since I was born just as it was ending on a brightly warm day in the capitol of California Sacramento at Sacramento General Hospital. It was a place I was not to see again until I was 40 years old as my mother took me back to the land of her birth Oklahoma when I was just six weeks old and in fact on the way home to Oklahoma America entered World War II with the attack on Pearl Harbor. At that very moment in history I was ensconced on a Southern Pacific train which had stopped for a long layover in El Paso Texas a place that would later play a part in my life. But back to October I have always loved the sights and sounds of October and particularly the smells. October is a month of transition at least in the part of the world which I have lived most of my life. In the great Southwest section of the United States October is the month that often starts out as the last gasp of summer and by the end of it morphs into the tinge time that brings us the first chilly breaths of the winter to come. And for me it has always been so, with the exception of a couple times and places in my life where I was in a place in October that was a more tropical clime and it felt more like summer than winter or fall. In 1961 I left for my overseas duty with the Air Force to the subtropical island paradise of Bermuda where temperatures were still hinging in the upper 80s and lower 90s (temperatures seldom go above the low to mid 90s in Bermuda and seldom fall below the lower 50s at night). I arrived in Bermuda in mid October and spent my first birthday away from my mother and brother there. I was to remain there for one more October. There are seasons in Bermuda but they are mostly spring, blustery, summer hot and humid, autumn warm and humid and winter, blustery and occasionally chilly. I next found myself back in the states arriving at my Texas home on the 22rd of September just as October loomed sweetly upon the horizon and on October of that year I attended my first and only Texas/Oklahoma shoot-out in the Cotton Bowl as a guest of my step-brother. Texas ranked #2 in the nation at the time and laid one on Oklahoma 28-7 and for the then #1 ranked Sooners things went downhill from there. On October 28th after celebrating my 22 birthday at my home of record the Wilbarger County Jail (my parents were at the time deputy sheriffs and ran the jail) I boarded a Trailways bus for the big city of El Paso on the Texas Mexico border and Biggs Field perched just north of the El Paso International Airport and only about 3 short miles from the largest Mexican border city of Juarez (once known as El Paso Del Northe) renamed in honor of the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez the Lincoln like leader who threw out the French and Emperor Maximillian. Octobers in El Paso are generally like those in Bermuda except without the humidity. And in the nearly 2 years I was stationed there the city had a grand total of 1/2 inches of snow which lasted a little over 3 hours and caused a (for then) record number of auto accidents numbering about 200 plus. Seasons do change in El Paso from very warm and dusty springs, to extremely hot essentially dry summers to not quite so hot and dry falls to winters that occasionally try to act like real winters but usually fail miserably in the effort though temperatures sometimes do fall into the lower 20s albeit briefly. And then when I got out of the Air Force I headed for Oklahoma City where autumns are more or less normal at least for this part of the country and where the days are warmly gorgeous, the mornings are freshly cool, the evenings pleasingly chilled and the nights slowly but surely morph into downright cold nights and by the final days of autumn here in the heartland autumn can and sometimes does get downright brutal. Such as the ice storm we had in December 2007 that hit across the state in one massive blitz downing trees, power lines and causing major damage to homes and businesses to where over 500,000 homes and businesses were without power for as long in some cases at 3 weeks. A limb fell from a tree in my back yard taking out my electricity, cable service and phone service in one fell swoop and I was without power for 11 days. But at least for me October is the nicest month of the year because of its shortened days, its softly warm afternoons watching our squirrel population in the city go nuts over their nuts (the kind from the trees), enjoying the brilliantly gorgeous mornings of fresh dew and slightly cool sunrises, the magnificent evenings just when the wind settles and the night begins to creep in slowly and softly enjoying the coming chill as it plays softly across your face and limbs and then the delicious feel of the nighttime as the moon rises proud and beautiful up over the eastern sky and watching as the stars fill the night with their brighter than usual glow. Tracing the rise of the Milky Way and watching the bent of the Big Dipper and trying to predict if it looks like rain or no. Thats what October here in the heartland means to me. And every year at about this time I look forward wantonly to its arrival with an anticipation no other season can evoke in me. October is a month just made for the poet that lurks within my heart and soul! I do love it so! Bob Bearden
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 03:25:35 +0000
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