it smells like october

Maybe it’s just because I drink too much coffee. They say that it clears your pallet so that you can smell the next thing, but I tend to think that I just have a very good nose. It smells like October. That crisp Autumn smell that forms everywhere when the heat leaves but the sun hasn’t. The smell of dried leaves and pumpkin spice. The smell before the fires, that crisp scent before an earthquake. That’s October in Oakland.

Maybe that’s why I can always place it, though April has a particular smell here too, light rain and cherry blossom, it’s just nothing like October. October is strong yet light, and hits you like a brick when you walk outside to go to work. A fair warning that winter will be here soon and possibly bad news. It’s the kind of overtaking feeling that reminds me of when I was little and my mom used to take me and my little brother to warehouse parties where they’d have hundreds of pumpkins for all the kids of the partying parents to carve. Loud music and good times. Or waking up to the whole house shaking and realizing that the most devastating earthquake you’ve ever experienced just floored the freeway down the street from you. October offers you the type of sky that turns orange in the evening and eerily reminds you of the time you woke up and it was that color with little black embers floating through the air for weeks because half of your city was on fire. It smells like trick or treating with your neighbors and endless nights of candy. Cozy hoodies and arguments over baking either pumpkin or sweet potato pie.

Being born in April makes October the halfway point of my year marked by the anticipation of Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the fresh end of Ramadaan. In no way do I look forward to rainy season, but all year I wait to get together with my friends and celebrate our fresh harvest of greenery and run around in corn fields scaring each other.

Just some random thoughts of what crossed my mind when I walked outside this morning and smelled that it was clearly October.