Fall's Changing Colors

I have a very distinct memory of the second Saturday of every October when I was growing up. It was the last day of my mother's annual fall deep-cleaning week, and I would wake up to impossibly clean windows waiting for me to go through a box of lovingly stored Halloween decorations and festoon them with jointed skeletons and scarecrows, and with thin, cardboard ebony cats with arched backs, and orange pumpkins with jaunty, black top hats. In the memory of this child of the '60s and '70s, October belongs to orange and black.