No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,

No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds —

November!

From “NO” by Thomas Hood

I remember sitting beside my successful actor friend’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills on Halloween in 1974. There we sat, young and lovely, tanned and sun-glassed, waiting to be movie stars. I remember how the Ginkgo tree at the end of his garden was going into rigor mortis. Its leaves didn’t even change color. They just turned a Mongolian yellow and hung on the branches, too overwhelmed by the smog, the sun tan oil and splashed chlorine to drop.

I lifted my glasses and looked around. “I miss the seasons,” I said.

My friend grunted, “No, you don’t. You just think you do.” He loved Hollywood. He’s dead now. True story.

I remember another Halloween, sitting with my young dancer neighbor Melissa on the front stoop of her brownstone on West 86th Street in Manhattan, my first year there in 1957. She was holding this pathetic little potted plant she had just rescued from a trash can. It was the afternoon of Halloween. There were only two trees on my block that never, all summer, had any leaves. They were like stillborn. My dancer offered me a handful of candy corn one of the kids had given her. She said, “Just think. Tomorrow is November.”

It didn’t feel like November. It just felt like New York.

I never thought much about autumn, or nature in general, until I moved to Maine. Autumn doesn’t happen in Hollywood except maybe on a back lot movie set. It’s pretty much the same as June or July.

Sunday will be November in Hollywood, and the temperature is scheduled to be 89. True story. It will be November here as well with probably a temperature of 49.

In 1984 we arrived back in the hometown of She, who personifies New England.

It was August and hot and humid. I asked, “So what’s the difference? Only more trees?”

Then suddenly one day it was autumn, and the world changed. I remembered autumn in St. Louis, Chicago and San Francisco. I remembered October in Tokyo.

But this was a different October. This was a movie October, a Gershwin and Van Gogh October. There was color everywhere, big flashy comic book color with orange and red, gold and chocolate. Color that made sounds, color like one of those big baskets of fruit kind people send you after you’ve had your colonoscopy.

Then the air turned dramatically cooler and delicious like lemonade, and then it was Halloween, and it was dark and the sky was full of stars. I remembered stars. In California, if you rode for two or three hours far out into the desert, past Palm Springs, past Indio and Coachella, and turned out the car lights and squinted really hard, you could see a star. I’m told it was better if you were high. Just sayin’.

But then, here in Maine on the last day of October that year, this big moon, the kind of moon that you remember from a Doris Day movie, drifted out from behind a cloud. And I swear I could hear Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade.”

So here I am all these years later, years full of autumns, Octobers, Halloweens and Novembers, still alive, still breathing air like lemonade, still amazed at the number of stars, the Doris Day moons, the comic book colors of turning leaves and the truly silent nights.

But then I remember Melissa telling me, “You know, tomorrow is November.” I knew that she meant that the Manhattan slush was coming with the snow that covered the black garbage bags. That soon old, romantic Central Park where lovers strolled would look like Poland after the war.

The poet Thomas Hood was right: November is pretty much the same everywhere, even here in sweet old Maine.

Just think. Tomorrow is November. It doesn’t feel like November. It just feels good to be alive.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.

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