I know a lot of people hate the month of November, especially here in the Northeast. It is almost always gray, dark, wet and windy, often without the layer of pristine snow that covers the sins of the careless yard person: unraked leaves, mole holes, bare dead patches of lawn. The ice on the pond skims, but doesn’t harden enough to hold up a duck, and the turkeys are so stunned they can barely fly their clumsy selves up to the lowest branches when startled. It’s a liminal time, neither here nor there.

The darkness, the darkness. The earlier and earlier sunsets, right through early December, then the winter solstice, the shortest and darkest day of the year. The deer are sneaking around, trying not to get shot. The squirrels are frantically stockpiling acorns to survive whatever January brings. Teachers hold on by their fingernails for the break the holidays provide.

I love November, though I didn’t always. This is why: more soups and stews, long braises of cheap cuts of meat, more baking. Wool shirts and fleece over Hawaiian shirts and shorts. Porters and stouts over lagers and ales. Boots over flipflops. Pinot noir and cabernet over rosé and pet nat. Sunrises and sunsets of peach, rose, and gold. 

I have visited San Diego. I cannot imagine living in a mono-meteorological world, where the sun shines every day and the temperatures don’t vary much. Give me a warmish rainy day like today followed by nose-hair freezing cold. Followed by whatever happens next. Cold mist, fine as wind-blown salt scours your cheeks. Surprise me. Besides, if we didn’t have the weather, what would we taciturn Mainers have to talk about with each other?

The threshold of winter is the tease of the past season, the promise of the future. My father died in November, my mother not long after. You would think that would spoil the month for me, but instead it reminds me to engage my memories.

Two years after they died—within a month of each other—I found myself teary in public, as if grieving them for the first time. It was a Christmas concert, choral music, in a cathedral in downtown Portland. The whole first year after they died, I was closing up their estate, so still involved with them somehow. They were still there for me, if only in the paperwork and the bequests.

Now I have these memories: my mother loved the Canadian Brass; their Christmas music was a staple of our home on the season. My father left work and drove to college in November of my freshman year to pick me up, after a clumsy judo instructor dislocated my right knee. He worried out loud that, like a friend who’d had a motorcycle accident, I might be crippled for life.

This is the season when we all have to pay more attention to the externals—the wind, the sleet, the dark. Snow is the least of our worries, when we have black ice. But we know how to be safe in those things. What we don’t always know is how to navigate safely the memories that hurt and heal us. November gives us space to do that, if we’re willing, to turn inward, be thoughtful and slow ourselves down. In that sense, it cannot be the cruelest month. If, indeed, there is one.