We continually restructure ourselves, feeding and maintaining evolving combinations in ways that ultimately permit a certain continuity: a form of life that is not in one-way, linear motion but, despite surprising jolts and changes of direction, composes a pattern. The protean nature of the self stems from its permeability to inner and outer influences, which are never fully separable from one another. We are shaped by a complex interweaving of external events and inner experiences, which become indistinguishable. What ‘actually happened’ in some past event in our life is inextricably tied to the phenomenological meaning we ascribe—that is, to our experience of the event. And this meaning changes as we continually respond to the blending of external and internal forces that make up our ongoing experience—as we revise and reshape the story of our lives.

Lisa Capps and Elinor Ochs, Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia

𝙴𝚍𝚐𝚊𝚛 𝙰𝚕𝚕𝚊𝚗 𝙿𝚘𝚎, 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚂𝚕𝚎𝚎𝚙𝚎𝚛 (𝚘𝚛𝚒𝚐𝚒𝚗𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚢 𝚙𝚞𝚋𝚕𝚒𝚜𝚑𝚎𝚍 𝟷𝟾𝟹𝟷)

“October was always the least dependable of months … full of ghosts and shadows.”

Joy Fielding

“The air of October is sweet and cold as the wine of apples,”

Edgar Lee Masters, from Songs & Satires (1916); “Johnny Appleseed”