October Winds

October Winds

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

 

Curse the cold, rainy, October winds!!!

Slayer of summer!

How dare they rear their ugly heads and unmercifully chase away those long, intoxicating days of the fair season

And replace them instead with gray, choppy, diminishing equivalents

Featuring harsh mornings and raw afternoons and sub-freezing nights and gusty, frothing gales

Violently stripping away the huddling, scarlet leaves from those towering maple trees that border our yard and morphing them into diminutive Tilt-a-Whirls which fill the angry air with their non-stop whirring

As they morosely begin their penultimate plunge at the behest of gravity, spiritedly performing a final, last-ditch pirouette into the drab, hibernating grass

Only to unceremoniously rot into rich humus in time if they are not first raked away by overzealous yardmen.

 

Oh, the October moon is wondrous indeed!  No doubt, no doubt!!!

And he eclipses his less luminescent cousins from last summer with ridiculous ease

But over what sterile landscape does our lustrous friend govern??

Let us sit down and count the ways:

One bereft of noisy, merry children, who are long since dispiritedly slouched over tidy wooden desks, semi-listening to pontificating teachers as they find themselves cocooned yet again in boring, tan, brick schoolhouses.

One bereft of ice cream, which has long since been stashed back inside the secondary freezer out in the garage, and even now is involuntarily retreating deeper within that appliance’s bowels as snoopy henchmen peer and sort right past it, intent on heatable, more seasonal delicacies.

One bereft of sensual, tantalizing, copper-toned skin, which long ago disappeared beneath ugly sweaters and thin nylon jackets and ubiquitous blue jeans, acutely sensitive to the plunging mercury in an antiquated thermometer nailed to the red siding of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century, pastoral barn.

One bereft of Old Sol, who oversleeps later each and every morning, and when he does finally struggle up and gets moving languishes further and further away from the celestial zenith.

And, finally……one bereft of beautiful, melodious songbirds, which hastily packed their bags in September and quite sensibly scrambled off to warmer climes when the first ominous hints of Fairbanks, Alaska crept into our weekly weather forecast.

 

Yes, the October moon is proud and majestic all right, but over what type of sterile landscape does he govern?

A dying carcass is all–Road kill!–life slowly seeping out of everything one surveys as the fading days of October slowly crawl by.

And by Halloween…….by Halloween, the landscape around here will be fully and unequivocally dead, with rigor mortis intractably settled in and autumn’s obituary already composed and sitting right next to the printing presses, soon to be published for all eyes to see, screaming out loudly and obnoxiously from the second page of the local newspaper.

 

Curse the cold, rainy October winds!!!

Go ahead—Curse them loudly, I say!!!!!  

They totally deserve a severe unneighborly upbraiding.

Slayer of summer, you are!! 

Chickenshiiiiiiiiit!!!!!!!

Return whence you came and let summer live on forever!

Return whence you came………NOW–THIS VERY MINUTE–I SAY!!!

And let me live on forever instead.

 

For as the landscape around me dies with each successive October

 

So, too, does a small part of me……