Nicole Junkerman
Seasonal
Nicole Junkerman on the Last Days of October 2026
A month ends whether or not anybody marks it. Three small things worth doing before November arrives with opinions of its own.
A month ends whether or not anybody marks it. Three small things worth doing before November arrives with opinions of its own.
October ends on a Saturday this year, which is a small piece of good fortune. A month that finishes mid week tends to end without anybody noticing. One that finishes at a weekend offers an hour in which to close it properly, and an hour is all that closing a month actually takes.
Finish what is nearly done. There is always a short list of things sitting at ninety per cent: a book with forty pages left, a letter written but not sent, a shelf half sorted. None of them will improve by waiting. Carried into November they become November's problems and acquire a small weight they have not earned. Finished this week, they are simply finished, and the month reads better in hindsight for it. The book notes exist mostly to catch the first of those.
Write one honest page. Not a review and certainly not a scoring exercise. A page in plain sentences about what the month was actually like: where the time went, what was read, what was abandoned and whether that was a relief. Writing it takes twenty minutes and it is the only reliable defence against remembering a whole month as the three days that happened to be difficult. The notebook method is built around precisely this habit.
Decide what crosses over. A new month is the cheapest opportunity in the calendar to stop doing something. Anything on the list that has not been touched since the first week can be crossed off without apology, and whatever is left will be carried more willingly for having been chosen rather than inherited.
What makes the end of October worth the hour is that the month has a genuine shape to it. It began with the light still generous and ends with the afternoons closing at four. Autumn arrived somewhere in the middle and nobody recorded exactly when. A page written now keeps the shape; a page written in December will have flattened it into weather.
There is also the matter of pace. November is a working month in a way October is not, and anything carried into it tends to be carried at speed. Choosing deliberately now is the difference between a busy month that feels purposeful and a busy month that simply feels busy. The notes gathered through the travel journal and the reading room both get thinner in November for exactly this reason, and it is worth deciding in advance which of them is allowed to.
None of this needs ceremony. An hour, a page and a short list of things let go. That is how Nicole Junkerman closes a month, and October 2026, which has been a good and unhurried one, deserves the hour.
Explore more of the journal: Reading Room and City Notes, or return to the Nicole Junkerman home page.