I know it’s time to groom Rockie Raccoon when her ears start to flop.
Rockie has these enormous, pointy ears that are one of her most endearing features. They’re almost comically large for such a little dog, and when they’re standing straight up, they are unmistakably hers.
She’s adorable when they flop too, of course. But after all these years with her, I know what those floppy ears mean. Her coat has gotten long enough that the fur around them has started weighing them down.
So yesterday I gave her a bath and trimmed her up.
And sure enough, when I was finished, those giant ears popped right back up.
I laughed when I saw them. There were those Rockie ears again.
Of course, they had been there the whole time.
I hadn’t given her anything new. I hadn’t fixed anything. I had simply cleared away enough of what had accumulated for something that was already there to stand back up.
Maybe I noticed it because October has arrived.
October has always been my favorite month, and I think part of the reason is that you can actually feel the year changing.
Some seasonal changes sneak up on you. October doesn’t.
After the long heat of summer, there’s that first day when you walk outside and realize the air feels different. Cooler. Lighter somehow. You start pulling out clothes you haven’t worn in months. The light changes. The days get shorter. Before long, the clocks will change too.
Here in Asheville, the mountains are starting to show their colors. A little red here. Some gold there. Then, seemingly all at once, entire hillsides begin to change.
Everything about the month seems to carry a little more energy. Football is in full swing. Baseball is winding down. School has settled into its rhythm. There are homecoming dances, pumpkin patches and hayrides. The holidays are beginning to appear on the horizon.
October has always felt like a kind of crescendo to me.
And maybe what I love most about it is that the change makes me pay attention again.
The world can be completely familiar and then, with a shift in temperature or light or color, suddenly I notice it differently.
Sometimes I think the same thing happens with our lives.
Dru and I had a really good weekend.
Nothing spectacular happened. We drove around Asheville Friday night just to see what was going on. We spent time at home with the pups. On Sunday we went to our friend Murphy’s house to help him and his mother celebrate her ninety-ninth birthday.
Mostly, it was just relaxed and easy.
At some point yesterday, Dru told me he felt like he was overflowing with gratitude.
He started talking about how much he loves his life. He loves me. He loves the pups. He loves our home. He loves Asheville. He said he felt satisfied and fulfilled in pretty much every part of his life.
And I realized I felt exactly the same way.
What struck me later was that nothing had really changed over the weekend.
We hadn’t moved somewhere new. We hadn’t reached some big goal. We hadn’t solved every problem or figured out the next ten years.
It was the same life we had been living a few days earlier, but somehow we could feel it more.
I’ve wondered since then whether the cooler weather had something to do with it. Summer can feel heavy to me after a while, especially when the heat drags on. Then October comes along and the air changes, and something in me seems to wake up a little too.
Maybe sometimes what changes is not the life itself, but our ability to feel it.
That thought brought me back to Rockie.
Life has a way of accumulating around us—work, responsibilities, routines, expectations, worries, old stories, things we meant to deal with, and things we’ve gotten so used to carrying that we barely notice the weight anymore.
Not all of it is bad. A lot of it comes from lives we chose and people we love. But even good things can become heavy when enough of them pile up.
And after a while, things we once felt pretty easily—joy, curiosity, energy, gratitude, a sense of possibility—can become harder to find. Maybe even some part of ourselves that once felt unmistakable.
When that happens, I think our instinct is often to go looking for something new: a new goal, a new plan, a new version of ourselves, something we can add or achieve or change that might help us feel like ourselves again.
But I keep coming back to another possibility: what if some of what we call reinvention is really recognition? What if the thing we’ve been trying so hard to find never actually went anywhere?
I’ve used the image before of a needle buried in a haystack. The needle doesn’t stop being a needle because it has been covered up. It is still there. The work is not to manufacture a new one. It is to uncover what was already present.
Maybe our inner light is like that too. Maybe it doesn’t go out as often as we think it does. Maybe life just piles enough around it that we have trouble seeing it for a while.
And every now and then, something shifts—a quiet weekend, a conversation with someone we love, the first cool morning after a long summer, a mountain beginning to turn gold. Or, apparently, a little dog with enormous ears getting a haircut.
Rockie wasn’t more herself yesterday afternoon than she had been the day before. She was Rockie either way.
But once some of the weight was gone, one of the things I love most about her was suddenly easier to see again.
I think that may be one of the reasons October feels so alive to me.
The world changes just enough to make me notice it again.
And sometimes, in the process, I notice my own life again too.
Yesterday it was Rockie’s ears, the cooler air, and Dru sitting there telling me how grateful he was for the life we share.
Nothing new had to arrive. For a little while, we could simply see what was already there.
Christopher
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