Preparing for Samhain

On October 31, many Celts celebrate Samhain, an antecedent to our Halloween. In the spirit of the season, decorations honoring both feasts have been acquired and are mostly in place. It’s not clear if any pumpkins will be carved this year, since our principal pumpkin carver (the Better  Half) is busy with other projects and the “young’uns” now have their own home to decorate and pumpkins to carve.

ghosts of Halloween to come

Photo by J. Harrington

In the 25 or so years we’ve lived here, we’ve not once has a trick or treater come to the door. Nevertheless, again this year we’ll pick up a few bags of candy, the kind we ourselves particularly like, just to be on the safe side. It just wouldn’t do to be without treats for any local ghosts, goblins, witches, wiccans and such, should any arrive at our door.

Halloween candy table decorations

Photo by J. Harrington

Yesterday, while returning from our trip collecting most of our decorations, we drove past a cornfield full of harvested stalks plus several dozen sandhill cranes. That was an unexpected and very pleasant surprise, even though it means they’re gathering and staging in preparation for their migration south. If they encounter much southern weather like last year’s Texas brutal cold spell, cranes and other waterfowl might as well skip the trip. If they stay up North, we can use the troughs  we used to use to feed whitetails, before CWD struck, to feed cranes in the winter.

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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