A Deep River Year
October 29, 2014

October is a delicious, joyous month, celebrated under a canopy of golds and maroons and the year's bluest sky. Sunday afternoon we picked apples at the local orchard. The wind was swirling and there was a nip in the air, but we came home with a bag full of Golden Delicious apples and the sweetness of autumn in our blood. We carved pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns, which will stand guard on our front steps this Friday night as a parade of children come to our door looking for "trick-or-treat candy." And we have rigged up our Ghoulie Girl at the end of our kitchen sidewalk.

This has become an annual tradition. Usually sometime early in October our granddaughters start asking about “Ghoulie Girl,” and so the supplies come down from the attic and the inflatable black cat and pumpkin emerge from the basement. An old nightgown and rubber gloves serve for the body and a broomstick for the arms. The face is an ugly mask attached to the post light, topped with an old wig and pointed hat. She looks enough like a witch to be scary, but we laugh merrily at her appearance.

Some communities are giving up the celebration of Halloween. Certain religious groups have an aversion to a holiday with roots in pagan worship and evil spirits. Others have a more pragmatic aversion to children running through the streets in the dark so that they can load up on candy. One area school system is encouraging a more generic "fall festival" instead. But the child in me remembers frosty nights and the shuffle of leaves, a bulging pillowcase and the smell of my breath behind a scary mask. And I still sometimes feel the shiver that comes from a moon peering through twisted branches, the wail of the wind, the possibility of something unknown lurking beyond the edges of my safe and familiar world. I want a candle inside a grinning pumpkin face to light up the night, at least for a moment. Though I am a child no more, I am glad for a Ghoulie Girl to remind me that joy can still turn away the darkness.

Ghoulie Girl

She stands guard,
 a nightgowned sentinel
 with crooked face and billowing dress,
 watching the shadows for us.
 We fashion this wild-haired spectre
 out of cloth and sticks,
 but also out of the old fears
 that lurk in the helpless places
 within us.
 We know the night,
 recognize the grim voices
 that cry out from a cruel, embattled world,
 hold our breath and cross our fingers
 that the blind angel of fate
 will fly on by.
 And we are haunted by
 our own shadow,
 the one that rises in our sleepless nights,
 the one we have not learned to love.
 So in the season of failing light,
 we set a little light to shine,
 some twisted smile to grin a hope
 into the night,
 then call it joy that bends our fears away
 when we are child again.

--Timothy Haut, October 29, 2014