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“The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.” ~ Jack Kerouac
~
A Love Letter to October
October feels like home.
I went to college in the mid-90s, about three hours south of the rural Nebraska town I grew up in. Around my junior year, I realized, and started sharing with others, that I got homesick in October.
That tug has stayed with me through mid-life.
There is something about October that has me longing for the familiarity of home, my parents, my brothers and sister, the cats of my childhood, my mom’s fall decorations, Halloween, the ease and comfort of being surrounded by a community that knew your scars, your triumphs, and your demons.
I wanted the slow cooker chili my dad would make me. My dad—a small-town, conservative man from a farm family—had perfected a vegetarian chili recipe for his bleeding heart, defiant, only daughter. I mean, that’s what I ached for in October, right? That’s home by definition: the feeling you get from a dad who somehow found (pre-Pinterest) a vegetarian chili recipe and pretended to like it because he wanted his free-spirited daughter to come home.
And I tied that feeling to October.
October even smells good. It’s brisk air and bonfires. It’s the smell of a tailgate, and tastes like cheesy potato casserole or apple cinnamon. It’s pumpkin and cider. A warm sugary latte and, obviously, chili. And if you’re from the Midwest, probably chili with a gooey cinnamon roll on the side.
My mom loved Halloween and all things scary—so October is also heading out in a red Mercury Cougar, crammed in the back seat with her window cracked to smoke Marlboro lights (more smells of home) while you venture out to some random cornfield you saw advertised on the highway on a cheap hardware store sign with scrawled Sharpie writing for a shady, uncomfortable maze a farmer is charging $5 a head for so you can walk through as a stunt that is legit terrifying and entirely unsafe and bizarre in hindsight.
I remember one year she got terribly lost, and frustrated, and put in a cassette tape of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” to keep us from being far more scared of being in the middle of nowhere on a gravel road with a car that surely needed endless repairs and no cell phones yet invented than any lame corn maze could make us. I mean, it was Nebraska; kids grew up husking corn.
Or meeting my sister downtown to wait in the long, long lines sick with anticipation and fear trying to mask how absolutely terrified we were to walk into some century-old abandoned warehouse to be scared out of our mind in a make-shift, six-story haunted house before real fire safety codes or rules about monsters touching or grabbing guests. All the while trying to show no fear in front of your siblings, or in our case our mom, knowing it would end in a lifetime of shame and teasing.
It’s driving up the hill to Blockbuster to rent a VCR and all the Jason, Freddy, Michael, Chucky, or Poltergeist movies and cramming into someone’s living room with Star Wars-themed sleeping bags, real popcorn, candy, and Shasta spilling all over the shag carpet (smells again) to stay up all night screaming, overreacting, and finding little ways to scare your friends or brothers and make a great story for school on Monday.
It’s watching Malachai, Isaac, and Linda Hamilton in “Children of the Corn,” and then sneaking out of a farmhouse during a slumber party in a plan conjured up under the bleachers of our high school with the elementary school boys in our class to meet up in an actual cornfield after watching “he who walks behind the rows”—before cell phones, texting, or Snapchat to make it easy. Rural terror for sure.
It’s football. Small town pride, homecomings, concession stands, make- shift flasks (now Yetis), freezing on bleachers, or sometimes sweating in the heat—all in the same week—when you’re really just there to eye a certain boy, or girl, and laugh with your friends under those well-celebrated and long-enduring Friday Night Lights.
It’s hiking, fishing, and camping, and the glorious smell of a campfire. And s’mores. And, of course, the ghost stories, sounds, camaraderie, and escape that go along with camping, hiking, or fishing.
I’m a Gen Xer. So in or around 1993, Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder introduced me to the flannel shirt as a necessary part of my outerwear options as summer faded—and even better a tattered, torn, and weathered flannel. For me, it’s a fashion staple that never left my closet or fall rotation. The flannel moving from my very not “cool,” non-fashion oriented father, to “cool,” and I would suggest timeless, is one more tie to the perfection of fall that draws my heart home, to my family, to my roots.
Even the drive home in October from college was the smell of too much small-town gas station coffee, incredible Midwest fall colored brilliance, 90s country music on the radio and an ache for the familiar. I’m sure there have been years when the drive was better than the visit.
As an adult, I don’t have my parents or a place to land when I’m homesick in October. But I do have football, Halloween, tailgates, and my Dad’s chili recipe. October is home and my parents and laying on the floor in my mom’s living room with Stephen King’s latest in the VCR, and a longing for the carefree days of recklessly running the streets on Halloween, planning gory costumes with my brothers, holding tight to my sister’s hand in a haunted house (no matter what comes), and carving pumpkins in my dad’s messy kitchen while my brothers pull out pocket knives, switchblades, and god only knows what else
I relive, remake, and reshape these memories, and continue to find joy in the flavors, scents, wistfulness, and glory of fall as it comes my way.
~
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