Le vent fera craquer les branches

La brume viendra dans sa robe blanche

Y aura des feuilles partout

Couchées sur les cailloux

Octobre tiendra sa revanche

Le soleil sortira à peine

Nos corps se cacheront sous des bouts de laine

-Francis Cabrel

The wind blew October to my doorstep like it was now in charge of the entire year.  And with the visual cues of autumn, I always reach a tipping point where my mind shifts to wondering about what I’m going to be doing come January. The final two months of the year? Well they just seem to run themselves. And I can feel all of this happening again, almost as if I am watching a vibrant color photo fade to a cold, yet beautiful black and white image.

Time is running. I use these constructions of phrase now, even though it is something that I never grew up saying. I notice them but allow myself to accept that I have changed the way I talk. Even beyond speech, I’ve made mental adjustments while at the same time keeping an eye on home. (Highlights: The Red Sox are dueling the Yankees in October baseball, the Bruins are currently giving a better home ice opener than what happened in Washington, DC last week). I acknowledge that I live with a kind of hybrid brain. This was again confirmed when I I learned that the Sox and Yankees were coming to London next year;  in a flash I knew that I’d be prepared to pay London prices in order to attend. I would not have thought such things if the game were being held at Fenway.

The fact of changing the way we think and talk is not something that is peculiar to expatriates. We all do it as we get older—whether we move to a new town or welcome someone new into our life. If we’re smart, we remain open to change and allow ourselves to be constantly (but reasonably) impressionable.

I remember watching an old home movie of me as a really little kid. I was in the kitchen sitting up on a stool, busy mixing away in front of the great picture window:

“Hey Megan, what are you doing?” Dad asked from outside the camera frame.

“Makin’ peanut buttah.” I told him, as if he should already know this.

Peanut buttah. That was a long time ago, because I don’t remember ever having such an accent. And while peanut butter will grace my slices of slightly burnt toast until the day I enter some convalescent home, that New England accent of mine dropped like the leaves on our October trees. Some things stay, some things leave forever…and perhaps some things come and go. I can tell you that each time I return to the Cape, I allow for a little bit of the accent to return. It’s somewhere there in my DNA.

I feel comforted in knowing that I retain fundamental pieces of myself no matter the season, no matter what I happen to be saying or doing. A strong and balanced identity works a bit like the metal grate holding the stuff that we feed into our fireplace. And when I say stuff, I kind of mean it. On any given day, you will see all kinds of flammable crap mashed in there and spilling out onto the hearth: used paper towels, empty pizza boxes, crumpled up Pennysavers. No matter how much “kindling” we subject it to, the end result is always a beautifully burning fire that goes great with hockey games. And at the end, the grate is the only thing to remain. Maybe it’s a bit more charred or banged up than it was before, but at the end of the day, it still stands.

So time is running, just as the days are now darker but will, after a certain period of time, grow lighter again. In many ways, I like this time of year best because it forces me to think carefully about change: What I want out of it, what I want to remain, and how I want to be changed personally in its progress. For now, I’m just holding out for a Boston victory while at the same time looking forward to whatever might come in the seasons ahead. For myself, for my home, and for what exactly that might look like as life progresses. These are the enduring reminders that always return to me in October.