An Ode to Halloween

...and my village

Good morning Halloween!

This is a love letter.

Today, I am remembering all the best Halloweens. There are so many!

But this is one of my favorites.

It is the year my mother died. Tommy is in Ohio, taking care of his father. My sons are away at school. I am a little lonely. I think maybe I should stay home this year, but I love Halloween, so put on my orange pants and a black sweater and go out to walk around anyway. My 10 year-old niece joins me. She is wearing a purple wig and dark eye make-up. It doesn’t hide her beauty.

I say, “What are you?”

“A weirdo,” she says.

“You’re in good company,” I say, and she says, “I know, that’s why I came to your house.”

Outside the sky is Minerva’s eyes—a dark gray blue sea of clouds and stars. The creek is rushing, rushing, rushing, as my niece and I walk past my neighbor’s porch full of jack o lanterns and ghosts.

We make our shadows dance with each other in the streetlights, following the rhythm of our feet and the water.

We curve our bodies, stick our elbows out at odd angles. Our shadows are huge! We are giantesses! Gorgons with wild hair.

This picture is actually of two shadows I saw this year.But you get the idea!

At the end of the road by the conservatory, Halloween is in full swing.

The streets hum with tiny people dressed up like all the magical things they dream of being--a princess, a pumpkin queen, a bunny with devil horns, a panda, Thumbelina, a fish. A vampire and a jellyfish pass us. “Call my Mom,” the vampire says to her phone. “I hope I don’t die!” “I’m googling it,” says the jellyfish. And then, to her phone, “Is the stuff inside a glow stick poisonous?”

We walk past old houses, watch the witches dance on Washington St.

We go from home to home, seeing friends, and I keep thinking  that maybe this is what Christmas used to be like, when people went door to door with small gifts, saying hello, wishing each other well. We go by my friend John’s place. John is a paleoartist with a studio full of real bones who does a haunted house in his front yard. Every year, my friends from the coffee shop dress up as monsters and scare children for hours. One year I took my older son Liam to John’s haunted house. Liam was six, and not sure if he wanted to go. He did want to be scared, but then again he didn’t, and he didn’t want to have nightmares. I told him I’d learned a trick for stopping scary dreams when I was his age. I’d pretend the whole dream was a movie, and I was the director. When things got too scary, I’d say in the dream, “Cut! That’s a wrap!” And the monsters would stop chasing me and sit down and we’d all have snacks and juice. “And that way,” I said, “I realized that the monsters were my friends.” Liam said he wasn’t sure that would work with all monsters, or even for him, but he decided he wanted to go to the haunted house anyway.

By the time we got there, though, the event was over. The monsters were inside having chili. My friend Bryan, dressed as a ghoul with black eyes and pale skin, was eating a salad. A ghost asked me how my husband Tommy was. Dan, still in his Dracula cape, was talking about a time John had gotten him to jump out of the graveyard to scare his kids, and at the allotted time Dan had leapt out at car he thought was John’s with a scream and fake blood in his mouth, and landed on the windshield of a police cruiser. A mummy laughed. I asked Bryan if he could fix the roof on our back porch and he said probably, give him a call. The mummy gave Liam some candy. “Wow!” Liam said on the way home. “The monsters really ARE your friends.” “Yes,” I said. “The best kind!”

My niece doesn’t want to go through the haunted house, so she heads to the bowl of candy held by a zombie on the porch. The zombie jumps up. “Is that Rebecca?” it says. “John?!” I say.  John, who I haven’t seen since Co-vid, disentangles some entrails and bones and gives me a hug. Then we are standing there, zombie to woman, woman to zombie saying, “How is your writing/art going?” “Terrible!” “Oh good. Mine too!” “Do you want to get coffee sometime?” “Yes!”

I am so happy to see my friend in his element. Bones, and spookiness and mischief. We promise to see each other again soon. My niece likes his costume so much she wants to be the same thing next year. I tell her the story about my son and monsters being your friends. “And they’re still my friends,” I say.

“That’s because you’re scary sometimes,” she says.

“Boo!” I say and we laugh because love in one of its highest forms is merriment.

 We start to walk home. I miss my mother, who was a psych nurse. She did not flinch in the face of people’s demons. She loved schizophrenics the most, she often said, because they could pull truth from the sky.

The streets are thinning out, still blocked to cars.

It could be 1880 or 1974 or 2023, it doesn’t matter. The air is excited—all these people celebrating their wild sides with delight! And what about the spirits that are our memories? That night they are in the wind, too. I remember the Halloween right after my grandmother died. My other son, Dawson, was four. He loved dressing up and had made his own costume, “Star Man!” by pinning a paper star on his pajamas and wearing a cape. He ran everywhere, ecstatic, his cape flying out behind him, a ribbon of joy trailing through the streets. When it was time to go home I said, “When we get inside we’ll light candles and turn out all lights and have a dance party.”

“Yes!” he said. “And Great Grandmother can come! It will be much easier for her to dance now that’s she’s a ghost and doesn’t have her walker.”

The streets are nearly empty now, the porch lights slowly turning off, one after another. On the steps of the Conservatory, a tree and a tiny Spider man, are done with Halloween. They cluster together, tired, bleary eyed, waiting for someone to come get them.

“Let’s shadow dance again,” my niece says. Why not? The night is still young! So we do, with no music except the rhythm of our feet. Stomp clap, stomp stomp clap. Our shadows separate and come back together. Sometimes we are two, sometimes one with many arms. The wind blows. The leaves dance too.

And then something splendid happens!

Other people join us. First one or two, and then a few more, and soon the empty street is a theatre of silhouettes—a princess, a witch, a dragon, a bat, an alien, and my yoga teacher, who is really a goddess.

Our shadows stretch and leap, strange and gorgeous, caught up in an October romp of darkness and light. The little bat raises and lowers his wings. The dragon does the same. I cannot convey to you the delight I feel in this moment! I am too busy making beautiful shapes with my arms.

Then, as quickly as it started it is done. The witch is only seven and wants to go home. The dragon, too, is worn out. The alien is mad at his mother, and the goddess is ready for a bottle of wine.

Our shadows shrink as we return to the sidewalk.

“Good night!” people say to each other. “Happy Halloween!”

“Happy New Year!” I say.

My niece goes back to her house. I go home alone and happy. I know that I will fall in love with this town and this season again and again, because the things that keep me tethered to this earth—moody skies, the smell of apples, orange, red, and yellow leaves, fresh coffee, the sound of rushing water and geese calling to each other—are here, along with the slate sidewalks the cupolas, and the old Italianate houses. When the night is this alive, how can the dead not want to come rushing back? How can they not want to come and sit at the kitchen table and talk about traveling the stars, being one with the rain, or how so many things we worry about here are funny?

What if everything in the universe thinks everything else is lucky? I imagine that the spirits are lucky because they can fly, because they are free, because they live in an expansive, peaceful realm where there is no pain. But maybe they think we’re lucky because we get to drink coffee and eat chocolate and feel all of these beautiful and varied things that don’t exist once we leave this form. I think of a sutra that goes something like: spirit longs for form, and form longs for the expansion of spirit. When I think of this, I see the dead and the living on both sides of the veil, arms open wide, saying, hello! We love you. Come visit whenever you can! Come! We can’t wait to see you. It’s wonderful here.

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