My nose opens—ah!
Pollen, amused at my hope,
closes it again.
****
I breathe through both sides—
a sweet vernal luxury
briefly permitted.
****
Nasal liberty—
brief, fragile, and under siege,
falls to the grasses.
****
Benadryl bargain:
air in the nose, sandbags in
the skull and eyelids.
Peach tree and redbuds—
two weeks of reckless color
before green takes over
Robins get the praise.
Worms, startled by my headlamp,
do the dirty work.
Ice on the fence.
Wind in the bones.
A long hour since the last sunflower.
We keep watch on the holy place:
the pole, the tray,
the little swinging box of mercy.
We have heard the saying:
Consider the birds —
we do not sow, we do not store,
and still we are fed.
Truly?
Then where does the love go
when ice turns minutes into hours
and the feeder hangs empty
as a promise?
Hush —
there it is — the human again,
the Large One with the Bucket.
Sound the alarm! (Not the danger one —
the food one.)
Titmouse first, bold as a rumor.
Finches like falling beads.
Chickadees stitching the air with cheers.
Cardinal on the top branch,
a red exclamation point:
Brothers! Sisters!
The generous hand has returned!
Go, tell the sparrows;
tell that nervous wren;
tell the whole freezing world —
Today, we do not starve.
Snow, then sleet: the driveway seals itself.
Seventy yards of polished “no.”
I stand with a shovel like a steel amulet,
praying for traction, bargaining with time.
The neighbor arrives; the tractor lowers its blade—
a calm solution to my private drama.
I miss my old Impreza’s cheerful grip;
I miss, most of all, being ready.
****
Forecast says doom. It delivers eight inches,
plus a neat varnish of ice on top.
Seventy yards becomes a logic puzzle:
how to get to work without a miracle.
My neighbor owns the miracle (diesel).
He clears my drive; I pay in thanks.
All year I don’t need a tractor.
All winter I want one.
Only a couple dozen left to go.
Last year I heard this song by Sean Keller: “Holy Fucking Shit, It’s Christmas.” It’s a guitar-driven rock song, very amenable to being shouted by a raucous crowd in a pub. I have to admit my first thought was irritation — my normal holiday fare is choral/classical Christmas music, along with mid-20th-century standards, so I heard the chorus and assumed this was just another cheap example of subversion: Haha, let’s write a Christmas song, but with profanity. But as I listened, I realized it was actually a pretty sweet sentiment. At first he’s almost annoyed that it’s Christmas again, shopping for gifts he can’t afford and that no one needs. Then he admits he has fond memories of December, and he wishes Santa would bring that feeling back. Then he accepts he’ll “never be a kid again,” he’ll “never be brand new,” but his reason for the season now is “Christmasing with you.” It ends up a love song — to another person, and to the time of year. A clever twist on holiday music after all.
As the years go, though, “home” gets redefined. Eventually we all end up as the person who dreams of Christmas elsewhere, casting our minds back to a time when our conception of the celebration first coalesced. You may be home for Christmas, but in a quiet moment you think to your childhood, to the tinsel’d tree, the monophonic record player, the bygone dog snoozing by the fire, the living room of grade-school years. You’ve made your own home since then. You’ve made a few. You’ve carried a particular ornament from home to home to make each tree part of the forest of firs in your Christmas memories. You are home for Christmas, but your dreams find their way back to the place you’ll never visit again.
He’s right: “home” keeps moving, but Christmas keeps a fixed address in the mind. You can be home for Christmas, in the life you built, and still, if you’re quiet long enough, feel your thoughts walk back to a room you’ll never enter again.
Mine is 1986. I was old enough to have quit Santa, young enough to still be giddy over the idea of presents, and imaginative enough to turn the whole thing into a playful epic adventure. My brother and I decided we’d do the thing you always think you’re going to do and almost never actually do: stay awake until our parents went to sleep, then sneak downstairs and look at the gifts around the tree.
I tried to keep myself awake by reading, which is how I learned that books can be sedatives. I plowed through one of my mom’s cheesy potboilers — Monster: A Tale of Loch Ness. And because I was awake, I started doing this weird Christmas Eve surveillance thing: I watched cars come and go from the end of our cul-de-sac. At 10:13 a car headed out. At 11:17 another. I remember being genuinely fascinated: Where could they be going this late on Christmas Eve? I had this childish notion that the whole world should already be settling its brains for a long winter’s nap. At 11:30 the neighbor’s lights went dark across the street. The neighborhood going inert, the world dimming, the last inn closing for the night. The clock ticked down to midnight. It’s go time!
We didn’t just plan it. We planned it like a military operation, complete with plastic walkie-talkies. Belly-crawling from shadow to shadow. Midnight rendezvous at the top of the stairs. Descent by the least creaky route. Objective: living room, right turn at the bottom. Problem: family room, left turn at the bottom — where my mother was wrapping presents while watching TV, fully awake, the sentry at her station. We tried it once. She caught us immediately and sent us back to bed.
We attempted another unsuccessful sortie around two. Eventually I fell asleep. I woke around five, disappointed, like I’d missed the important part. I don’t remember a single present I got that year. But I remember the anticipation so vividly that it still feels like a magical Christmas.
I still love this time of year. I love the decorating, the smells of baking and seasonal scents, and especially the music. But I’ll admit there’s one part of childhood Christmas I haven’t been able to recreate: the extravagance of the gift-pile. I’ve never really been in a position to ring the tree with a couple dozen boxes, the kind of abundance that makes the room look temporarily enchanted.
That’s the funny thing about the 1986 “mission.” We weren’t plotting to steal anything. Even if we’d succeeded, we wouldn’t have opened a single present. The rule had long been that we could only open stockings if we woke up before our parents, and we had no intention of breaking it. We just wanted to look. To tally the packages, to see which ones were ours, to feel the suspense in our hands without spending it. The nostalgia is for the tense, quivering anticipation; the sense that the world, for one night, was quietly stockpiled with surprises.
“Well, boys, do you see? It’s all one, yes?”
“Yes—” someone murmured.
“Always the same but different, eh? every age, every time. Day was always over. Night was always coming. And aren’t you always afraid, Apeman there? or you, Mummy, that the sun will never rise again?”
“Yesss,” more of them whispered.
And they looked up through the levels of the great house and saw every age, every story, and all the men in history staring round about as the sun rose and set. Apemen trembled. Egyptians cried laments. Greeks and Romans paraded their dead. Summer fell dead. Winter put it in the grave. A billion voices wept. The wind of time shook the vast house. The windows rattled and broke like men’s eyes, into crystal tears. Then, with cries of delight, ten thousand times a million men welcomed back bright summer suns which rose to burn each window with fire!
“Do you see, lads? Think! People vanished forever. They died, oh Lord, they died! but came back in dreams. Those dreams were called Ghosts, and frightened men in every age—”
“Ah!” cried a billion voices from attics and basements.
Shadows climbed walls like old films rerun in ancient theaters. Puffs of smoke lingered at doors with sad eyes and gibbering mouths.
“Night and day. Summer and winter, boys. Seedtime and harvest. Life and death. That’s what Halloween is, all rolled up into one. Noon and midnight. Being born, boys. Rolling over, playing dead like dogs, lads. And getting up again, barking, racing through thousands of years of death each day and each night Halloween, boys, every night, every single night dark and fearful until at last you made it and hid in cities and towns and had some rest and could get your breath.
“And you began to live longer and have more time, and space out the deaths, and put away fear and at last have only special days in each year when you thought of night and dawn and spring and autumn and being born and being dead.”
— Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree
Today, Halloween is a fixture of American culture, a beloved national holiday. But if the soul of Halloween — its connection with the unpredictable and unseen world of the spirit — had not been carefully guarded in our culture form the very beginning, the holiday might well have been lost to us. Although Halloween has never received the official legal status of Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July, it is nevertheless a feature of our calendars and a date anticipated with great excitement and preparation. Despite its commercial trappings and other pitfalls of any fully modern holiday, Halloween provides something that is unique: a full-fledged celebration of fantasy. It is the one night of the year when all is overturned, when the natural order reverses itself. The dead walk, the glamorous grow horrific, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Children rebel and adults kick up their heels and holler at the moon. It is a holiday of magic and mystery, and one, through a peculiar blending of culture and custom, that is uniquely American.
— Lesley Bannatyne, Halloween: An American Holiday, an American History
****
Call it Samhain, Summer’s End, All Hallows’ Eve, November Eve, or Witches’ Night — Halloween has its essential roots in the terrors of the primitive mind, which made no distinction between the waning of the sun and the potential extinction of the self. Ancient rituals of sacrifice and supplication were employed to guarantee a good harvest and, by extension, continued earthly existence.
In Northern climates, harvest time was, or seemed, the very death of nature. As Robert Chambers, the great Victorian chronicler of holidays, characterized October: “As the fallen leaves career before us — crumbling ruins of summer’s beautiful halls — we cannot help thinking of those who have perished — who have gone before us, blown forward to the grave by the icy blasts of Death.”
Because life itself was literally in the balance at harvest, the close proximity of the visible world and the spirit world was more than metaphor. And so the tradition grew: for one night each year, permission would be granted to mortals to peer into the future, divine their fates, communicate with supernatural entities, and otherwise enjoy a degree of license and liberty unimaginable — or simply unattainable — the rest of the year. The Halloween machine turns the world upside down. One’s identity can be discarded with impunity. Men dress as women, and vice versa. Authority can be mocked and circumvented. And, most important, graves open and the departed return.
— David J. Skal, Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween
****
As a holiday without an official patron, Halloween has never been securely anchored in national narratives. It has always operated on the margins of mainstream commemorative practices, retaining some of the topsy-turvy features of early modern festivals — parody, transgression, catharsis, the bodily excesses of the carnivalesque — and recharging them in new social and political contexts. That is part of the secret of its resilience and vibrancy.
— Nicholas Rogers, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night
****
It was both the first day of the new year and the first day of winter. As a point of transition in the annual calendar, a great many beliefs and rituals were associated with the day. The gates that separated the worlds of the living and the dead, of this world and the world of spirits, were opened, the barriers between this world and the next were down, and the souls of those who had died during the year were allowed entry to the otherworld. Bonfires were lit on Samhain, some say to light the way for the spirits, others say to keep them away from peoples’ homes. With the belief in in the wandering spirits of the dead came the custom of preparing offerings of special foods, and of dressing as these spirits and as wild animals. We can only guess at the connections people made between the harvest of crops, the slaughter of animals, and the death of human beings in the cycle of life; or between lighting fires at the onsent of winter and the increasing darkness, between mimicking the wandering souls and respecting them, and between the ritualized offering of food to spirits and their representatives: real human beings who need food to live.
— Jack Santino, Halloween and other Festivals of Life and Death
****
If, in our imagination, we were to journey backward in time, we might come upon a witch of long ago in some moonlit country lane. With her pointed hat and ragged cloak we see her shuffling along, muttering to herself as she makes her way to a sabbat beyond the churchyard walls. Like a shadow a black cat moves behind her, its eyes glowing in the dark. She does not look towards us, for her crooked form keeps her eyes fixed to the ground. And as we pass by we glance over our shoulders, wondering at her second sight and the secrets she hides in her lonely heart.
Or it might be a girl we come upon — lithe, alluring, her hair shining in moonlight with the lustre of a raven’s wing. Her smile would melt a heart of stone. But who knows what mischief is in her thoughts, and who would not fall under her spell?
Throughout the years there have been countless stories of witchery, told around the fireside at Hallowe’en or the Eve of May. Many are lost and will never be heard again. The following tales, gathered from home and abroad, were found in state and county archives or lay in the memories of those who recall characters and incidents related by their forbears.
— Ken Radford, Fire Burn: Tales of Witchery
****
Thus the first theory of the origin of the scarecrow is that it may have started out as a sacrifice to Nature. We have seen that the jackalent was originally a sort of puppet-like figure at which, during Lent, people hurled sticks; prior to this, it was cocks that were the object of these attacks. So is it not possible to argue that perhaps in pagan days man was done to death in this manner and then set up in the fields as an offering? Might this not be the reason why in Normandy and Brittany — where Druidical rites were once prevalent and where legends about them survive in abundance — a life-size effigy of Christ on the cross is set amidst the corn each year? It could be surmised from this that the Church had sought to turn its people from the barbaric custom of slaughtering a real man by providing an alternative which was an all-sufficient sacrifice.
— Peter Haining, The Scarecrow: Fact and Fable
****
Britain’s humble scarecrow may have derived from a Greek god of fertility named ‘Priapus’ (or ‘Priapos’). Priapus was regarded as the protector of farmers, shepherds, fisherman, vine growers, beekeepers and goatherds. His emblems were the cornucopia, pruning knife and a phallus, and he received first fruits with libations of milk and honey. Further, he was adopted as the guardian of orchards, gardens and vineyards where his crude statues, painted bright red, were erected to ward off thieves. Donkeys, asses and pigs were his sacrificial animals, reflecting his animal lust, and there is extant a collection of ‘priapeia,’ anonymous, obscene Latin verses. The Oxford Classical Dictionary underlines this dual role of Priapus: “He was adopted as a god of gardens, where his statue was a sort of combined scarecrow and guardian deity.”
The Romans copied the Greek custom of carving wooden statues of Priapus to ward of birds from their fruit and crops. Columella, a Spanish gardener cum Roman soldier who lived in the first century A.D., cultivated vast acres of land in Central Italy. He recommended that Priapic statues should ideally be hewn out of an old tree stump in his treatise on agriculture, ‘De Re Rustica’ (c.65 A.D.) Roman gardeners daubed figures of this rustic satyr purple and gave him a club in one hand, to make him appear more dangerous, plus a sickle in the other to ensure an abundant harvest.
— Gregory Holyoake, Scarecrows
****
The word “kakashi” is supposed to be derived from a meaning of something that smells hideously awful, and is said to have been derived from the Edo period word “kagashi” (although the word etymology inexplicably resembles somewhat the Bengali word for scarecrow Kaktadua (কাকতাডুয়া)) or Kag-darawa (काग-डरावा) from the Hindi, which suggests possible connections with the Indo-Sakas, source: Scarecrow). Many fascinating tales and legends surround the use and character of the kakashi in the rice field in Japan.
In Kojiki, the oldest surviving historical chronicle in Japan (compiled in the year 712), a scarecrow known as Kuebiko appears as a deity who cannot walk, yet knows everything about the world.
