Before there was Halloween, the Celts celebrated Samhain

This morning we brought the tractor home from the tractor doctor's. The "owies" in the wiring harness made by the mean mouse are fixed. Since tomorrow is Halloween, we'll consider the treat to be getting the tractor back in time to get some work done before we're buried in snow. The trick was the size of the bill to get the equivalent of stitches in the wiring harness. At least now some of this year's leaves have been mower-mulched and we can haul the ones in the drive to our compost heap. Our township, for reasons unknown, decided to not participate in the local government cooperative compost site so residents are on their own. Maybe leaf burning is legal?

jack-o'-lanterns all lit up

Photo by J. Harrington

Yesterday's observations about ponds icing up seems to have been prescient. Even some larger ponds are now ice covered. That will move more and more of the waterfowl in the area onto the larger water bodies that are still all open water. There's a recently harvested cornfield between the house and the tractor doctor's that was literally full of Canada geese. We had only a brief glance at them since we were watching traffic, but estimate there were easily several hundred geese in the field. That pleased us no end. We've long been fans of Canada geese (they're not Canadian geese unless they have a passport). They're good looking, faithful, fierce defenders of their young, all in all full of characteristics we wish more humans exhibited.

a fire to celebrate Samhain

Photo by J. Harrington

Tomorrow is the last day of October, Halloween or All Hallows Eve. It's also Samhain, "...the division of the year between the lighter half (summer) and the darker half (winter). At Samhain the division between this world and the otherworld was at its thinnest, allowing spirits to pass through." We suspect that the water in our hoses has frozen, a source of concern should we torch our brush pile tomorrow night. We'll check tomorrow but are not hopeful. Maybe we'll have to wait until next Spring and have a Beltane fire or, a smaller fire in our fir pit tomorrow AND a Beltane fire next Spring.

Samhain

By Annie Finch

(The Celtic Halloween)

In the season leaves should love,

since it gives them leave to move

through the wind, towards the ground

they were watching while they hung,

legend says there is a seam

stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil

earth from the sky in one last pale

wave, as autumn dies to bring

winter back, and then the spring,

we who die ourselves can peel

back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.

Tonight at last I feel it shake.

I feel the nights stretching away

thousands long behind the days

till they reach the darkness where

all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch

move with me, and when I brush

my own mind across another,

I am with my mother's mother.

Sure as footsteps in my waiting

self, I find her, and she brings

arms that carry answers for me,

intimate, a waiting bounty.

"Carry me." She leaves this trail

through a shudder of the veil,

and leaves, like amber where she stays,

a gift for her perpetual gaze.

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