For the Love of October

For the Love of October: Day 1/31

In a stunningly punctual change of seasons, the first of October also brought a chill to the air. The month of October has always been my favorite, there is something about the sunlight, yellow like the goldenrod in bloom and the sky saturated in orange and red when it sets, the amber brown leaves and pine needles covering the ground and the feeling on your skin when the cool air blows through an open window on the fuzzy sweater you finally get to wear. I associate so many smells with October, like the smell of the Halloween bins we've had since we were children, full of costumes and decorations, the glitter-encrusted construction paper pumpkins from elementary school and the gypsy shoes and pink leotard I still somehow fit into fourteen years later. There is a smokiness to October, the scent of all my neighbor's cooking wafting from their open windows, baking and roasting, the resins from the pine trees and the herbal fragrance of hot tea lulling me to a warm and cozy sleep. It is really a month in tune with my senses.

For the Love of October: Day 11/31

Last October (2010) I undertook a personal project devoted to capturing the way I felt about this glorious month, aptly titled For the Love of October. It was a photo-a-day project, meant to encourage me to go outside and wander and become inspired again. It also served as a diary, a chronicle of my adventures and experiences, a tale of pumpkins and skeletons, of seeing Bob Dylan for the first time, the abandoned house we explored in our cold-weather clothes, of the food I ate and the books I read. (If you are looking for an October book to read, it is Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.) I look back on these and I remember how much a change in season can make me happy, how an entire year can pass to reveal how much I have grown and how the people in my life are exactly who and where I want them to be, it really reminds me of how great life can be.

The inspiration for the project, taken October 2009.

For the Love of October: Day 21/31

For the Love of October: Day 8/31 and Day 19/31

While I am not undertaking another project like this again this year, I will still take photographs for the feeling of October, for the love of October. I'll be posting them here, my new diary, along with the many other adventures of this crazy life, fitting all that I can into my last semester in college and hoping to capture enough of it to tell the story again.

For the Love of October: Day 30/31