How could anyone ever miss or ignore October’s splendor? More to the point, why would anyone ever want to do so?

October is autumn personified—the bright and colorful quintessential image you conjure up in your mind whenever you think about autumn’s exquisite days.

Sure, the season officially began during the final days of September with a passing equinox. But that was merely an astronomical marker, a convenient bit of scientific bookkeeping to satisfy our calendars and almanacs.

It’s also true autumn will officially reign through all of November, plus most of December’s snow and ice and Christmas decorations.

But neither those early nor latter days look or feel like true autumn—not autumn as depicted on calendars; not the autumn we imagine. That autumn occurs in October.

An old English proverb says, “October hath always one and twenty fine days.” That seems about right. You can seldom fault October for its weather—and the few cloudy or rainy days easily go unnoticed given the color show.

October is gaudy of dress and mild of temperament. Each successive day seems bent on outdoing the one before. There’s an elegance to the days themselves, a natural grace that seeks to sum up and define the season while coalescing all that has gone before: spring’s promises were fulfilled; summer’s hard work paid off.

This is the month of dramatic leaves. Red and gold, orange and burgundy, yellow and amethyst—plus assorted shades of beige, ruby, lemon, hazel, and salmon. Some trees even sport leaves in two or three different colors, while others might wear them with edges trimmed in one hue and centers of something entirely different.

The variations are endless. And there are just enough leftover and reluctant greens to make all those once-hidden colors pop even more.

Once the autumnal fires are lit, the colors seem to increase daily. By the middle of October area woodlands are a patchwork paintbox of colored leaves. Walk in the woods reveals the whole forest aglow as if illuminated by a magical inner light.

October’s daytime skies are vast and intensely blue, sometimes dotted with clouds so white and puffy-thick you think they could be made of whipped cream. The air is rich and redolent of the season—a smell infused with apple cider and woodsmoke.

It’s an enchanting landscape, one of breathtaking— kaleidoscopic and grand. A place where myth might find form and appear like a dragon in the nebulous dawn—or sunsets might reveal a castle keep’s golden treasures.

“There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir,” wrote poet Bliss Carman—before going on to add how we “must rise and follow.”

The old nature-savvy versifier understood the seasonal stimulation and its inevitable subsequent compulsion. October stirs internally, and Bliss realized the personal necessity for some of us to become both witness and participant.

I completely understand this reaction because it precisely mirrors how I feel every year when October rolls around. What I don’t understand is how anyone with a whit of interest in the natural world could ignore the call and spectacle of this extraordinary month.

Savoring October can be as brief and easy as a half-hour’s foray ambling around your neighborhood sidewalks, visiting a local park—or, if you prefer, taking a long, slow drive on the county’s rural backroads and byways. Even better would be to spend a morning following a sparkling stream on its bankside path. Or heading south and east, and treating yourself to a whole day rambling Ohio’s hill country—hiking and exploring the steep, timbered slopes and secret, cloistered hollers.

Still, whether the venue is near or far, what’s important is the doing—the personal experience and savoring, regardless of how and where you choose to become a participant observer.

October begins under the waning silver gleam of the storied Harvest Moon. Nights grow progressively darker, their chilled autumnal skies a rich black velvet spackled with a scintillating array of twinkling stars. A new moon is birthed on the 14th. Before this tenth month ends, October graces us on the 28th with a full Hunter’s Moon.

Amid this pale light, you might still catch the last hurrahs of katydids and crickets—midnight fiddlers whose performance time is fast running out. Two or three cold nights in a row and they’ll be gone.

Here along the river, I often listen to owls hooting into the shivery darkness—a lonesome sound, ancient and mysterious. Too, as the Hunter’s Moon swells and brightens, I sometimes hear the wild gabbling of northcountry geese—discountenanced travelers, now making their annual move south; birds having felt that inner tug that means it’s time to go.

Oh, to be a wild goose on the wing! I’ve been sympathetically spellbound by night-flying geese all my life—deeply stirred, completely mesmerized. Geese on the go under a starlit autumn sky pluck and pull at my heartstrings in ways and of an intensity I’m incapable of explaining.

Seasonal reality comes in October—a fact that can’t be overlooked or denied. October is in-your-face autumn—a time for amblers and ramblers, mystics and meanderers, vagabonds and dreamers.

October is simply stunning!

Reach Jim McGuire at [email protected].