October is a month of mixed emotions

We're closing the bedroom windows more often now, sleeping more comfortably, though a little claustrophobically. Soon, we will close them for good.

One evening, we will see basil. The next morning, we will see compost.

Wearing sandals makes less and less sense, but you'll have to pry them from our cold, dead feet. Which, some days, seems likely.

October is a month of mixed emotions, the scene of so many goodbyes. Yet it's also a passage to wondrous moments.

An overnight frost will ignite the landscape, with trees and sumac reverberating in gold and bronze and scarlet and copper.

If you like winter, you can start imagining in earnest the ski trips, the sledding hills, the hearty stews and cocoa.

And for rallying cries, you can't beat the perverse communal joy in complaining about Christmas decorations stacked in the store aisles.

When else can a chore like raking prove a revelation, if you let small children remind you how fun it was to collapse into a pile of leaves?

When else is promise so delightfully packaged as in a display of pumpkins, each one — like Michelangelo's blocks of marble — having a face within, waiting to be set free?

When else is the sky as blue as it can be? Bluer than blue jays, bluer than the Blue Man Group, bluer than the shadows of trees stretching across the snow.

Oh.

This is where mixed emotions seep in, because Minnesotans know in their bones that it can snow in October — 28.4 inches, to be exact, as the legend is passed down about the great Halloween Blizzard of 1991.

Mixed emotions.

October can be a month of surpassing beauty. The North Shore works its usual magic, as long as you bring a coat, but the Mississippi River bluffs shouldering through Red Wing and Winona also are breathtaking and often require only a sweater.

The fall colors are never a given; we've all trudged through Octobers that never rise above shades of brown, tan and beige. A lack of foliage fireworks feels like a betrayal, as if Mother Nature dismissed all those times we endured mosquitoes because they feed the dragonflies, weathered humidity because it makes great sweet corn or accepted a rained-out picnic because … because … it makes great sweet corn.

That's why a gorgeous October feels bestowed upon us as a reward, a month of ripe apples and sweet squash, of football games under the lights and final bonfires on the beach.

Gardeners clean up their wilted beds, again with mixed emotions. It's been so easy picking dinner only steps from the front door, gathering in tomatoes and eggplant and basil, maybe some zinnias for the table. On the other hand, no more weeding and watering and fending off rabbits. Pollyanna knows you can't say that about California.

You can't help but dance a bit to prolong your passage, the leaves' dry rasp clattering like distant applause as autumn takes its bow. "Encore!" we call, even as we're slipping on our coats.

Mixed emotions.