What's Nice About October

For cyclists who like summer, not seasons, September is a bad month. First you hang on to summer for dear life, but it slips away gradually but surely. You may be able to put off wearing tights, but it's rarely warm any more, just adequate. Certainly on top you have to start messing with multiple layers again. The daylight at the end of the day especially gets ever shorter, and the anxiety goes up: in a few weeks it will be fall and all hell will have broken loose: rain, wind, cold, dark--and snow and ice won't be far behind. But then October comes, and even though there are those wet, windy days, it really can be quite nice still also. Yesterday and today we had temperatures close to 60 (15 celsius), and it was calm and only partly cloudy. I could not take advantage yesterday, but this morning I had an absolutely lovely commute. Nothing remarkable happened, just the realization that while it's really fall now, almost November even, and even though I was wearing tights and two long-sleeve jerseys on top, the riding was easy, smooth even. It helped that I was passing a major traffic jam on the freeway leading to Amsterdam, but the main thing was the calm weather. Of course I took the long way in (18 as opposed to 16 miles)--in these circumstances it hardly took any extra time. There will be plenty of other days between now and next May, but they can't take today away from me.