Shop Skulls
I noticed this trio after shutting off the lights for the night.
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I noticed this trio after shutting off the lights for the night.
August in Snug Harbor – The final bake of the season.
Asphalt shimmers and tired leaves droop in the soggy, sultry air. Relief comes in a quick cloud shadow, a short cool breeze. But Sol is relentless and there is much broiling and sizzling to endure before the fall of night.
Finally, though, shadows come out to prowl. From low places they stretch up, reaching for the purple and orange sky. The earth sighs and clicks to herself, cooling after a long, hot day.
Bats wheel and swoop in the watercolor sunset and three familiar night-lights appear. Lanterns among the sparks of stars.
All summer there have been these close and pleasant companions – Venus in the west, Jupiter in the east, and Saturn in the south.
But there have also been three watchers that wait patiently for the hated lights in the sky to shift away.
When real darkness returns, these three are its usher:
Calamity, Pariah, and Infamy.
When angels turn their backs, watch out! Lock your doors, pull the sash, and pray. Pray that thin line of salt across the threshold really does hold power to keep them out, because it’s cold on a broom stick at 10,000 feet, where the thin air stifles the screams of a soul devoured.
These are the Grim Sisters.
In the oppressive Ohio Valley heat of July and August, when stepping outside is like taking a warm bath wearing all your clothes in the middle of a Vietnamese jungle, it’s sometimes difficult to maintain the Halloween Spirit.
In fact, it seems like my enthusiasm wanes more as the mercury rises, time drags, and domestic distractions scream for attention. A wave of confusion and disorderliness threatens to overwhelm.
That wild, overgrown tangle of weeds in the yard sends tendrils to lick at the back door. An ever-thickening shroud of dust and clutter that I never seem to have time to clean reminds me that it’s there like an unwelcome and unwashed houseguest who leaves his socks draped over the couch and toenail clippings on the floor. Entropy exerts itself mercilessly and a steep slide into depression is an unremitting threat.
And then someone pokes his head down into the hole and says something nice like, “I really like your pumpkins.” Or, “I’ve always wondered how to do that. Thanks!”
This occasional voice out of nowhere, some tiny praise, a shared memory, or even a call for “heeelllp!” re-lights that little Jack-o-lantern fire inside us. Because sometimes that grinning, glowing ember that holds all our best secrets and keeps our bones from turning to dust – Sometimes that light flickers.
Are we really such attention hogs? Is a pat on the back so important to we haunter-types with names like CB radio handles and spaghetti websites and garages filled with all of Dante’s horrors?
I think that it’s not the pat, but the implicit hug. Acceptance. Approval. These aren’t always our daily companions, so when they drop by for a visit, the temperature plunges to 68 degrees and the moon glows orange.
Halloween blows in on a brisk wind of licorice and candle wax, and a thousand trunks in a thousand attics thump altogether to rearrange the skeletons and wolf-mans and mummies within – tattered costumes still scented with last year’s leaves and bubble gum.
And a tiny Jack-o-lantern flares back to life, and smokes, and perfumes the air with the smell of roasting pumpkin.
“Can you feel the wind blowing?”
What a neat scarecrow to ice the blood during the hot Dog Days of summer.
~ Artist