I am reliving October to the fullest. I went walking at 6:30 tonight, which means I didn't not get back until 7:45. Just a typical walk, a little strip of peace inside our town I always enjoy. But tonight felt like October to me. I didn't return until dark was pretty much settled… which added to my autumn bliss. I was gone a little over an hour, but it felt timeless.
I have always loved this month - and not simply because my birthday is smack in the middle or because of Halloween, although the two do play a role in my enjoyment of the season. It is the time of transition that amazes me every time - the feeling of being precisely between summer and winter, and having the best of both. The mosquitoes are dying. The air is turning brisk, the leaves are turning colors, but a freeze has not killed off the growing plants… nor is it quite cold enough for a coat. The heavy humidity of summer is lifting. I can feel the days growing shorter… in a cozy sort of way.
As a writer, there are so many things that spark my imagination this time of year. So much beauty in the leaves, and the smell of them as they drop… the only dying thing that actually smells nice. The goldenness of the light. Sweaters and scarves. Candlelight - not in a pyromania sense but in a light-in-the-darkness sense. Cider. Chocolate and marzipan in the forefront of my memory from an Oxford October two years ago. Bonfires and secret identities. Really pretty gourds and squashes. The image pool runneth over.
Halloween is a tiny fraction of it. As a child, I appreciated it for the make-believe aspects - the idea that I literally transformed into a witch, or a nurse, or a dead Spanish dancer, or a fairy, or Luke Skywalker, or a summer nymph. The haunted-house monsters running with chainsaws, the display of severed body-parts and the ode to serial killers - the dark hints of the rotting, and the evil, and the macabre only scared me. Pumpkins in the night did not conjure images of Sleepy Hollow visits from the Headless Horseman - but faces smiling out into the dark. Glowing. It took me to other worlds… imagining that I truly was a new person riding into the unknown in the darkness. Candy seemed to be small consolation for it coming to an end, when the grease paint washed off and the fantasy drifted to November's calmness.
The fact that it is so historically rich grabs me nowadays. Neo-pagans may dance and conjure up a ritual to commemorate the passing of ancient Celtic Samhain… which involved human sacrifice, go fig. But I think back to the medieval fears of fairies and witches… the actual shaking belief that the dead did return. Halloween is a way to step back in their shoes, hear their stories and feel the chill come on after harvest. In a way, we are taken time-traveling this month, not to digress… but to open the possibilities… even if we get scared along the way.
Oh, lovely post! Thank you for this. I also get a lot out of October, even if it's just a quickening of the blood that gives me a little more energy - that old, old feeling of "Winter is coming! Gotta store up the food!" See the children's book Frederick for more on this!
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm with you about the transformative-ness of the holiday, though I wish the wonderful innocence of childhood Halloween didn't have to grow into the festival of sketchiness it is for adults. I love what you say about pumpkins - the glowing, smiling faces out of the dark.
Another perspective on Oct 31: for Catholics, it's the eve of All Saints Day, when we celebrate the saints in heaven...my Catholic group in college actually had a "saints' costume party" one time. And All Saint's Day (Nov 1) precedes All Souls Day (Nov 2) when we're supposed to pray for all the dead (the whole Purgatory thing). So all the imaginative energy of October is building up to this wonderful COLLECTING of all humans, all human history and good and bad at the beginning of November. I like that.
It's funny to think that we silly Protestants have used Halloween as a Protestant pride day. Reformation Day parties with the game entitled "pin the 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenburg Church"... commemorating Luther's world-shattering actions.
ReplyDeleteShrug. I prefer the All Souls feel to it, myself! *wink*
I didn't know that - how funny! I bet they're not unrelated phenomena, actually - to dislodge an old holiday, you usually need to replace it with something. If it's a very, very old Protestant custom, it probably started as a way to wean people from All Saints' Day. Ah, history. So interesting.
ReplyDeleteYou almost sold me on October. Almost! Another opinion of fall, from Tom Robbins: "It was autumn, the springtime of death. Rain spattered the rotting leaves, and a wild wind wailed. Death was singing in the shower. Death was happy to be alive." Give me long days and hot sun and vacations; I'm a summer man.
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