(Note: Republishing due to a technical glitch.)

A couple weeks ago I went up to Ann Arbor for a fiber festival and was reminded of how much I love southeast Michigan in October. Rather than getting back on the highway on my way home, I took local roads as I drove south from the Washtenaw county fairgrounds. Passing through the cute little town of Saline, I feasted my eyes on the early fall colors of the leaves and the stunning azure sky. I felt my heart lift as I drove.

Michigan is my second home, as I lived in the northern Detroit suburbs for 15 years before moving back to Ohio a decade ago. I often miss the rolling hills and softly-winding roads that we don’t have in the flat farmland of northwest Ohio. Hills are apparently in my blood: I grew up in the Appalachian foothills of southeast Ohio, and I even lived in a Michigan town with the word “Hills” in its name. I think I took all those hills for granted until I found myself struggling to feel at home in the “flatlands.” Luckily my house is only five miles from the Michigan border, so I can easily get up there to enjoy the scenery. Some years when I get impatient for fall foliage in Toledo, I just drive up into the Irish Hills of Michigan for a sneak peek. I’ve also been known to drive into southern Ohio for extra servings of color as ours fade in the northern part of the state.

If I could spend the entire year in October, I’d happily give up summer and winter. They’re just too intense. I’d miss spring too, but I think it might be a tradeoff I’m willing to make. My super-sensitive eyes have always made it painful to be in brightly-lit places, and I’m finding as I age that I can barely tolerate being outside on a bright summer day, even with sunglasses. But as the sun begins to sit lower on the horizon in autumn, my eyes get a reprieve and I can enjoy being outdoors more with the less harsh sunlight.

Every year I think about the phrase ‘October Sky’ when I look at the gorgeous azure color above me on so many autumn days. I knew about the wonderful movie with that name but wondered why they’d named it so; was there some other usage of that phrase? I did a bit of searching and the internet says (take that for what you will) that when the movie studio was making a film based on Homer Hickam’s memoir — about him pursuing the study of rocketry in defiance of his coal miner father — they didn’t think the book title “Rocket Boys” would be good for the film. So they put those two words into an anagram generator and it came up with “October Sky.” (Rocket Boys => October Sky) And when they realized that October was when Homer first saw the Soviet Union’s satellite Sputnik, the movie name was locked in. I love that story.

As I understand it, the darker blue of our sky in October is a result of there being less moisture in the air and less scattering of the light.

Besides the sky and the light, what else do I love about October?

• The smell of decomposing plants, as odd as that sounds.
• All the farm stands selling pumpkins and straw bales and mums.
• The pleasing combination of gold and purple among the goldenrod and asters in my garden.
• The amazingly diverse mushrooms that proliferate in the woods as well as my lawn.
• Fresh pumpkin pies, apple cider, and donuts everywhere.

Every time I write about fall I have to include this bit of poetry:

Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now
how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of the air and the endless
freshets of wind?

Excerpt from Mary Oliver’s “Song for Autumn”

And while we’re in October, let’s not forget Halloween! I photographed this neighborhood cat stretching atop my fence one year. I loved how he chose the perfect spot to do a ‘Halloween black cat pose’ above the red foliage of Virginia creeper on a tree stump. Whenever I have to remove a tree from my yard, I leave a five-foot stump of the trunk and allow climbing plants to cover it. This creates a fantastic habitat for insects to live in the decaying wood and foliage, and for birds to feast on them. I often see woodpeckers probing the cracks of this stump for their daily protein.

My Michigan home was surrounded by sassafras trees and their fall color was such a joy to see every year. Did you know that a single sassafras tree has leaves in three different shapes? They’ve got an unlobed leaf as well as two-lobed and three-lobed leaves. In a playful mood a few years ago, I made some of the three-lobed leaves into cute little Halloween ghosts.

I’ll leave you with a few more of my favorite fall photos from parks near my home. I hope you get a chance to spend time enjoying the beauty of October before it’s gone again!