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We flung open our windows this weekend. As the kitchen curtains flapped gently with the October breeze, we were reminded of an editorial from Oct. 1, 2005.

Dark-winged butterflies swarm to animate the dull desert broom. The air dries quickly, ending the month with half the humidity it carried at the start. Children are giddy in anticipation of the holiday trio —Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas.

October makes a strong argument for the best month of the 12, even though it was knocked out of sequence in the modern calendar. It falls in the 10th spot now, carrying a name that's associated with "eight" in Latin. As if to establish its place, October overachieves.

Look no farther than your nose or the TV and you'll find a score of post-season baseball games ending in the World Series, plus NFL on Sunday and Monday, college football Saturdays, high school football Fridays and pre-season NBA. A Fox Sports columnist calls it "mighty October," rivaled only by April among couch potatoes.

It's the local appeal that may put October over the top for Tucsonans.

No, you won't revel in an assault of reds, oranges and yellows just by stepping outside, as people do in New England and Virginia this time of year.

"Here, the minor phenomenon announce only what is more a mere shift of emphasis than it is a revolution," wrote Joseph Wood Krutch, the naturalist, philosopher and part-time Arizonan, describing fall in the desert.

Lest you think Krutch was disappointed, though, listen to the rest of what he says in his 1951 book, "The Desert Year":

"But where drama is absent, nuances are all the more appreciated."

You can, for example, find a milder spectrum of foliage if you go looking up Mount Lemmon or Madera Canyon this month. An added treat for your trouble: The quaking of golden aspen delights ear as well as eye.

Other natural wonders abound, spelled out in the handy guide, "Southern Arizona Nature Almanac," by Roseann Beggy Hanson and Jonathan Hanson. Snout butterflies and painted ladies join the dark-winged purple hairstreaks in a dance whose graceful vigor belies its silence. Winter raptors such as streaking merlin and prairie falcon take up residence in grasslands. All but invisible, lumbering black bears gorge themselves on nuts and berries for winter hibernation.

October in the desert also is free of the dread it carries in colder climes. Instead of foreshadowing freezing blasts of wind, October delivers desert dwellers from scorching summer heat.

Days over 100 degrees are rare. The monthly average, the Hansons report, is 84 degrees — not the ideal 72 degrees of November but a significant decline from the 93 degrees of September. Gardeners here can finally quit leafing through their seed catalogs and venture out, just as gardeners elsewhere gather their tools into the shed.

And it's a dry warmth. Nothing like the 13 percent relative humidity of late May, but you can feel sweat take a holiday as the wetness declines from more than 50 percent in early October to 25 percent by the end.

Serious investors may put this one at the bottom of their list of favorite months, "because October has produced a disproportionate number of truly spooky market days," notes columnist Allan Sloan in Newsweek.

We, however, believe that ending on a slightly supernatural note commends this month above others.

Enjoy it.