The Grey Street Almanac — October 2026: The Hunter's Moon and a Month for Remembering

Dear Friend,

October is the month the year stops pretending. The warmth goes out of the afternoons for good, the evenings come down early and blue and smelling of woodsmoke, and the trees give up their green to show you the colors that were waiting underneath it all summer. Everything is letting go of something — the maples their leaves, the garden its last tomatoes, the sky its long evening light — and none of it seems the least bit sorry.

It is also, very anciently, a threshold. In Ireland, the first of November was Samhain — one of the old quarter days of the year, the turn from summer into winter — and, as with most Irish festivals, the celebrating began the night before. The festival has changed its clothes many times since then. The feeling underneath it hasn't.

I think of October as the month for remembering. Remembering the people who came before us, and the ones we've lost along the way. Remembering the old stories, told again by lamplight because the nights are long enough for them now. And — this one matters to me most — remembering who we were before we learned to make ourselves smaller and quieter and easier to hold. The wild half of the year is not the bad half. It is the half where the roots do their work, out of sight, in the dark.

Welcome beneath the Dreaming Tree. Light a candle if you have one, pull the blanket up, and stay awhile. I'm glad you're here.

The Sky This Month

If September was the year's last clear stretch of road, October is where the sky starts circling back. Two of the personal planets turn retrograde this month, one at each end of it — and in an old almanac's way of thinking, that makes this a month for revisiting rather than beginning.

Venus stations retrograde on October 3, in Scorpio, and stays that way until November 13. Venus is the planet of love, beauty, and what we value, and a Venus retrograde is traditionally read as a season for looking back at those things: old friendships, old loves, the question of what is truly worth your heart. Not the moment for reinventing yourself. A very good moment for remembering what you already cherish.

The New Moon in Libra arrives on October 10 — the scales again, a quieter echo of September's equinox. A good night to set one small intention about fairness, or about a relationship that could use some tending. Then, on October 23, the Sun enters Scorpio: the sign of depths, of endings and renewals, of the things we keep below the surface. It is, fittingly, the sign that carries us through Halloween.

The very next night, October 24, Mercury stations retrograde, also in Scorpio, until November 13. The old advice holds and is simply practical: back up what matters, reread before you send, and leave a little room in your plans for delays. It is a fine month for finishing, revising, and rereading.

The month's great moment is the Full Moon on the evening of October 25 — the Hunter's Moon, full at 9:12 PM in Arizona (just after midnight on the 26th, Eastern time), in steady, earthy Taurus. Meanwhile Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune carry on their long retrogrades, and Pluto turns direct on the 15th. There are no eclipses. Nothing here to fear — only a sky that favors looking back over pushing forward.

Gentle themes for October: Let things fall. · Revisit before you begin. · Remember the ones who came before. · Rest is part of the harvest. · The wild half of the year is not the bad half.

Moon Lore — The Hunter’s Moon

The Hunter's Moon is the full moon that follows the Harvest Moon, and it comes by its name honestly. By late October the fields have been reaped and the leaves are coming down, and the deer and foxes, fattened on summer, have nowhere left to hide. The old almanacs say this was the moon to hunt by — and the sky helped, just as it did last month: the moon's shallow autumn path means it rises only about half an hour later each night instead of the usual fifty minutes, so for several evenings running it comes up near sunset, with hardly any darkness in between.

This year it is full on the evening of Sunday, October 25. (East-coast calendars will print the 26th — it tips past midnight there. Here in Arizona it is still Sunday night.)

The Hunter's Moon is an English folk name, and it is not the only one. To the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), this is Binaakwe-giizis, the Falling Leaves Moon — month names vary from community to community, but that one needs no translating on an October afternoon. (A small correction to last month's letter: Waatebagaa-giizis, which we called the Falling Leaves Moon in September, is more truly the Leaves Changing Moon. The leaves turn in September and fall in October.) Other names you may meet — the Travel Moon, the Dying Grass Moon, the Blood Moon — were gathered and popularized by the Maine Farmer's Almanac in the 1930s, and are best held a little more loosely. (And October's "Blood Moon" has nothing to do with eclipses; there are none this month.)

The Seasonal Almanac

Why do the leaves turn? All summer, a leaf is busy making green chlorophyll and breaking it down again. As the nights lengthen, it stops making more, and the green fades away — revealing the yellows and oranges that were there all along, hidden underneath. The reds are different. Those are made fresh in autumn, from the sugars left in the leaf. So when you walk under the trees this month, remember: the gold was always there. The red is new.

Across much of the country, October brings the first frost, the last of the garden, and a great river of migrating birds passing overhead in the dark. In the desert Southwest, the calendar runs its own way: October is when the long heat finally breaks — in central Arizona it is the month of the greatest temperature change of the whole year — and the true planting season begins. Garlic, greens, carrots, and radishes all go in now.

Wherever you are, one small kindness for the garden: leave the leaves. Most butterflies and moths don't migrate at all; they spend the winter right where they are, as eggs or caterpillars or chrysalises tucked in the leaf litter, and bumblebee queens sleep an inch or two under the soil. Rake leaves into the beds instead of bagging them, leave a brush pile in a corner, and save the tidying for spring.

And the holiday at the end of it all? Its history is older and stranger than the costumes. In the 830s the Church fixed All Hallows' Day on November 1, which made October 31 All Hallows' Eve — Hallowe'en — followed by All Souls' Day on November 2, for praying for the dead. In Ireland, Scotland, and parts of England, people carved lanterns from turnips and mangelwurzels and lit them from within; Irish and Scottish immigrants in America found the native pumpkin far easier to carve, and the jack-o'-lantern we know was born. (The popular idea of a "thinning veil" on this night is a modern one. What folklore does record is Hallowe'en as "spirit night" in the Irish countryside, when the family's dead were thought to come home.) Just to the south, Día de los Muertos, October 31 to November 2, is its own tradition entirely — a Mexican festivity welcoming the dead home with marigolds, candles, and their favorite foods.

The Apothecary Shelf — Rosemary

Last month it was sage; this month, its cousin. Rosemary was moved into the sage genus by the botanists a few years ago — it is Salvia rosmarinus now — but its old name, from the Latin ros marinus, means dew of the sea, for the Mediterranean cliffs where it grows wild. And for centuries it has been the herb of remembering.

"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance," says Ophelia in Hamlet. "Pray you, love, remember." Shakespeare's audience knew exactly what she meant: mourners carried sprigs of rosemary at funerals and cast them into the grave, and in Romeo and Juliet the Friar tells the family to "stick your rosemary" on Juliet "as the custom is." It was woven into bridal wreaths, too — for love and for loss alike. The custom is still alive: in Australia and New Zealand, people wear a sprig of rosemary on Anzac Day, because it grows wild on the cliffs at Gallipoli.

A fine herb for a month of remembering — and, happily, one of the few that shrugs off drought and heat and grows almost anywhere with sun. Tuck a sprig by a photograph. Put one in the roasting pan.

(Folklore and garden tradition — not medical advice.)

The Berry Basket

Look for: apples · pears · cranberries, which reach their harvest peak this month in flooded crimson bogs, bobbing to the surface because each berry holds a little pocket of air · pomegranates, ripening early in the desert heat · persimmons · quince · late grapes · pumpkins and every kind of winter squash · sweet potatoes · turnips (the original jack-o'-lantern) · chestnuts, hickory nuts, and walnuts · and the very last of the figs.

From the Kitchen — Soul Cakes

These little spiced cakes have been baked for this time of year for more than four hundred years. On All Souls' Day, the poor and the children of the English countryside went souling — door to door, singing for a soul cake and promising a prayer for the household's dead in return. (Soul, soul, for a souling cake…) It survived in Shropshire and Staffordshire into living memory, and it is a very good candidate for an ancestor of trick-or-treating. Somewhere between a scone and a biscuit. Makes about eighteen.

You'll need: 7 tbsp (100 g) butter, softened · ½ cup (100 g) sugar · 2 egg yolks · 2 cups (250 g) all-purpose flour · 1 tsp allspice · ½ tsp mixed spice (or equal parts cinnamon and nutmeg, with a pinch of cloves and ginger) · 2 tbsp milk, with a pinch of saffron steeped in it if you have one · ⅓ cup (50 g) currants or raisins

Heat the oven to 350°F and line a baking sheet with parchment. Cream the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy, then beat in the egg yolks. Add the flour and spices, then the milk, and bring it all together into a soft dough. Knead in the currants.

Roll out on a floured board to about ½ inch thick and cut 2-inch rounds, re-rolling the scraps. Set them on the sheet and mark each with a cross on top, as they traditionally were. Bake 18–25 minutes, checking at 18, until golden at the edges and firm. Cool on a rack; they keep for days in a tin.

For the oldest flavor: a household book from 1604 spiced them with nutmeg, cloves, and mace — use those instead. For a low-energy week: make the dough one day, chill it overnight, and bake the next.

A Cup to Share — Roasted Root Hearth Tea

A dark, toasty, caffeine-free cup that tastes like woodsmoke weather — and a root harvest, from under the ground, for the month the garden goes to sleep. Per mug, simmer 1 tsp roasted chicory root, 1 tsp roasted dandelion root, half a cinnamon stick, and a curl of dried orange peel in 1½ cups of water for five to ten minutes (roots want simmering, not just steeping). Strain, and add a splash of milk and a little honey or maple. Roasted chicory has a long history as the stand-in for coffee in hard times — through Napoleon's blockades in France and the Civil War in New Orleans, where it simply never left. Variation — Chai-Spiced Roots: add two crushed cardamom pods, two cloves, a slice of fresh ginger, and a few peppercorns to the pot, and finish with warm milk.

At the Garden Gate

What you may notice this month: the monarchs finishing their long journey, arriving in the fir forests of central Mexico right around Día de los Muertos — and in Mexican tradition, their return has long been seen as the souls of the dead coming home to visit · sandhill cranes arriving by the thousands to winter in the Southwest, their rattling calls carrying for miles at dawn · juncos, the little gray "snowbirds," turning up under the feeders as if they'd never left · orb-weaver spiders at their biggest, spinning their largest webs of the year — which is why October always feels like spider season · and squirrels burying acorns in a hundred small hiding places, forgetting some, and planting oaks by accident.

And the woolly bear caterpillar, trundling across the path. Folklore says the wider its rusty middle band, the milder the winter to come. A museum entomologist tested it for eight years in the 1940s and '50s and found it didn't hold up — the bands really tell you how old the caterpillar is. It will spend the winter frozen solid in the leaf litter and wake up in spring, which is a better trick than forecasting anyway.

The Night Sky

October's sky has one great planet, one quiet departure, and two meteor showers — one lucky, one not.

The great planet is Saturn, which reaches opposition on October 4: it sits directly opposite the sun, so it rises at sunset, rides high at midnight, and shines at its brightest of the year. Even a small telescope will show you the rings — tilted nearly edge-on this year, a slim bright line of an ellipse — and there are few sights in the sky that make people gasp quite so reliably.

The quiet departure is Venus. If you followed her as the evening star through September, watch her go: every evening in October she sinks a little lower into the sunset glow, and around the 23rd she passes between us and the sun and disappears altogether. She isn't gone. By mid-November she will climb back up into the dawn as the morning star — the same planet, returned from the other side of the sun.

The lucky shower is the Draconids, on the evenings of October 8 and 9. The moon is only a thin sliver then, so the sky is properly dark, and this is a rare shower best watched in the early evening rather than after midnight. It's usually modest — ten or so an hour — but it's a gentle one to stay up for. The unlucky one is the Orionids, peaking around the 21st and 22nd, when a bright gibbous moon will wash out all but the brightest; your best chance is the dark hour before dawn, after the moon has set.

If you're up early, Jupiter blazes in the east before sunrise, with fainter reddish Mars nearby — both in Leo. And after dark, the autumn stars are fully in charge: the Great Square of Pegasus overhead, Andromeda trailing from its corner, and the little misty cluster of the Pleiades climbing out of the east by mid-evening, a sure sign of the cold months coming.

And on the 25th, the Hunter's Moon, rising big and amber near sunset, several evenings running.

From the Grey Street Library

This month's revisit: The Tame Trilogy

Three songs, one arc — the attempt, the reckoning, and the vow. They said I was made to be tame, it begins. Soft voice, pretty smile, no waves, no flame. This short piece from the Archive walks through all three in the order they were meant to be heard. Since this month's soundtrack is the last of them, it felt like the right thing to set beside the fire.

Read it in the Archive →

This Month’s Soundtrack — “I Won’t Be Tame Again”

A song for the wild half of the year. I won't be tame again, it goes — won't turn my howl to a whisper just to fit in. It is the last of the three Tame songs, and it isn't a victory lap. It's a promise, quiet and absolute: to stop negotiating with your own soul, and to stop confusing love with disappearing. October, when the whole world lets its true colors show and the old stories come back out of the dark, felt like its season.

♪  Listen on your platform of choice

Quiet Practice — A Name and a Light

On an evening near the end of the month — Halloween, All Souls, or any quiet night you like — write down one name. It might be someone you've lost. It might be a grandmother you only know from stories, or an animal who waited for you at the door. It might even be a younger version of yourself, the one who was louder and braver before the world asked you to hush.

Light a candle beside it if you have one; a lamp is fine. A sprig of rosemary, if you have it, is a very old way of saying I remember. Then say one true thing about them out loud — something they loved, something they taught you, something you'd tell them now. That's the whole practice. Remembering is not the same as grieving, though sometimes they hold hands. Mostly it is just a way of keeping someone at the table.

Around the Village

A gentle two, for the haunting season:

• The Soul of a Witch Tee — for the ones who were always a little bit wild, and have decided to stop apologizing for it.

• The Ghostly Little Things Glass Tumbler — a small parade of friendly ghosts for your cider, your tea, or whatever gets you through a long October evening.

No urgency. They'll be here whenever you're ready.

If this is your first Grey Street Almanac — welcome. My hope is that these pages become something you return to each month: not for predictions, but for perspective. For stories. For old traditions. For recipes worth sharing. For a reason to step outside and notice the moon.

However October finds you — bright with it, or bone-tired and just getting through — let the leaves fall. You don't have to hold on to what the season is asking you to set down. Remember who you love. Remember who you were. The dark half of the year has always been where the roots grow deepest, and the light always comes back around.

Gather what remains.
Create something meaningful.
Preserve what is worth remembering.

Until next month —

With gratitude, Seraphina Grey

Grey Street Press · Meet us beneath the Dreaming Tree.