I’m writing this because my mom wants me to.
I’m writing this because my friend Angie’s mom Barb asked.
I’m writing this because it’s time to return to simpler things. Some of them anyway.
So, we will begin as we always begin: in the fall of 1994, I was on the road with a music ministry team. That August, we went to Minneapolis as strangers, were issued a van and trailer full of sound equipment, and sent out on the road. Alison and Tammy and Tim and Tanner and Lucas and I. We were some combination of Friends, Road Rules, Up with People, but Lutheran.
We spent a lot of October in Wisconsin, in churches on backroads, leaves falling orange and yellow around us. There is no more October place than Wisconsin.
I don’t know why we started, but we decided we needed a theme for every October day. An October Thought for the Day.
It was simple things. One day was Chex Mix, another day was the falling leaves, yet another was candy corn. I kept track in a spiral notebook that is lost to the sands of time.
It was a strange and simple time in my life, that year on the road. It was also one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I learned how different my everyday life was from those of other people. I, raised as an only child, learned to live in community with others in a very confined space. I learned that sometimes when people think no one will listen to them, they will sit down with a stranger and tell them the most horrifying details of their life and they will feel their burden lift while handing some of that weight to a person they met just hours before.
When I came home from that year, the October Thoughts went on hiatus until 1998 when I bought my first home computer. I sent them every day to my little email list and, over the years, that list grew exponentially. I would stay up late at night, researching and writing hundreds of words every day in October. When the email list became cumbersome, I moved to a blog, then to to this current blog platform and eventually, other things got in the way and I stopped writing them entirely. I wrote other things and then I stopped writing altogether. The world was too complicated. Time moved to quickly. Everything felt chaotic.
Everything still feels chaotic.
October to me has always been a sentimental time. As the weather turns colder, the days darker, we’re indoors more and my mind turns to remembrances of times, places, people long gone. I think of the elementary school I went to when we lived in the desert. I remember holidays at my aunt and uncle’s house in Napa. And now, having visited both of those places in the last couple years, those memories feel closer than they have in years.
October is returning. October is remembering.
octoberthoughtspdx 