Kate Flora: It is one of those days, or weekends, or weeks, when I’ve had a dozen great ideas for blog posts and cannot seem to choose among them or get organized to write them. So tonight, as I was driving along admiring the full moon after a spectacular day by the ocean, I thought about entering the month of October. October makes me happy, because it is crisp and fresh and gorgeous, with the bluest skies and the bluest water and energizing wind. One of my Joe Burgess mysteries, Redemption, opens on an October day much like today.

October makes me sad because it is followed by the grays and browns and dull golds of November. Therefore, I have to remind myself to seize these beautiful days. Stop bending over the keyboard hour after hour, but get up, go outside, and breathe it in. The smells, the geese honking overhead, the clouds of butterflies and frantic bees.

One particularly splendid aspect of October is that, for some reason (which a weather person might explain) we have the loveliest and most spectacular sunsets then. Even as I grow cranky at the fact that my days are shorter, they are coming to an end in unsurpassable fashion.

Obviously, October has just begun, so I can’t share this year’s sunsets with you yet. But this weekend, I was scrolling through years of photographs, trying to organize them into categories (including whimsy, abstracts, and signs), and I kept scrolling past breathtaking  sunsets.

I imagine that everyone’s camera rolls (or the current equivalent thereof) are full of photos of sunsets. We all want to try to capture that magic, though we’re rarely successful. But since I have the luxury of a west-facing view, I have some that for me, at least, still make me draw in a breath and go, AAAHHH! OH! YES! How lucky I am to have seen this.

Let’s see what you think.