October is the month I notice my attention most clearly, because the trees do half the work for me. The colours change every two days, the light gets thinner, and the mind, walking, has nothing to do but follow.
Reading: I started the month re-reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which I read first at twenty-two and remember as a book about a creek. It is not. It is a book about looking. Twenty years later, the prose lands differently. There is a passage about a praying mantis that I think about often.
Cooking: I have been making the same loaf of bread every Sunday for three months. The recipe is a mistake from a cookbook I bought in Lisbon. The result is too dense and slightly sour and I have grown to prefer it to anything I can buy. There is a lesson here about practice, but I distrust easy lessons from kitchens.
Walking: there is a route through the park I have been walking three times a week since 2019. I cannot tell you a single new thing about it. I can tell you the precise shade of the pine bark on the third tree past the fountain in mid-October. The two facts are related.