The French Roast pod clicked into my Keurig, I pushed the blinking blue button and went to the front door. This is my routine most mornings, start coffee, turn off front porch light and open the door. I want the morning sunlight to hit my face and jump start the old circadian rhythm, but it’s just pre-dawn and still gray when something catches my eye, something black, and velvety. There’s a huge spider sitting on the ribs of the life-size skeleton relaxing in my rocking chair.
The skeleton I arranged just a few days ago – one leg draped onto a column with the opposite arm raised in greeting. But the Big, beautiful, black spider?
Don’t get me wrong, I love most bugs! And spiders eat mosquitoes so they are doubly loved but I didn’t put this stuffed one on my porch. I asked Bob if he was the culprit – he just looked perplexed and asked if it was a real spider. So, there is the opposite of a porch-thief in our neighborhood; someone is adding to the Halloween decorations! And since my brain doesn’t function until an hour after the coffee kicks in, I put this particular conundrum on the back burner and made my breakfast – yogurt with a ripe pear.
Once our nest emptied out, Halloween lost most of its cache. We never had any trick-or-treaters in the Blue Ridge, and living in downtown Nashville meant drunken bridezilla/hen parties instead. But this is a neighborhood in the best sense, Mr Rogers sense of the name. There’s a Golden for every family and a Doodle for every couple. Les walks her granddog Teddy, a tiny white Shih Tzu, in a doggy pram and was among the many who left me food while I was recovering from Covid Rebound. Aha, of course… I was betting on Les for the spider.
Our porch looks festive, but not over the top. I gave up on pumpkins years ago when we moved to the South. No use in watching them rot in our hot Fall, southern-exposure front yard. But this skelli presented itself to us, it was lying around in our alley one year like a recalcitrant teenager. It was like the yoga ball that rolled into our yard just when I was thinking I needed a yoga ball! The Flapper was right – what the mind can conceive you can achieve! She was a real positive thinker who collected buddhas in the latter part of her life.
The Rocker called to ask if I had a picture of him in his Sonic the Hedgehog costume, the one I made when he was about the Pumpkin’s age. Seems he was working on the new animated movie, and he did make the cutest little hedgehog. I loved sewing Halloween costumes out of felt and cooking up a big pot of chili while baking cornbread. Ha, I was a real multi-tasker back in the day! But I never went in for Halloween decorating in or around the house. Now I’ve made patchwork cloth pumpkins and thrown a few gourds in a bowl on the dining room table and put mums and a skeleton on the….
Today we Americans spend around 11.6 BILLION dollars on All Hallows Eve.
Why? Is it the candy? Are we beginning to embrace death as just another part of life? Why am I so sad about streaming the last few episodes of The Good Place? I never felt like this with Netflix, like I didn’t want a series to end. I thought I’d get tired of the endless references to David Hume, but it is the antidote to this election season. We humans can get better, we can learn, at least I want to believe we can.
The Bug is dressing up in one of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour outfits, and the Pumpkin will be dressed like an old man. The end is near I’m afraid for these pre-teenagers. The Bride told me her Parisian friends admitted that Halloween is catching on with the French, but mostly just for parties and costumes. They would never send their children out into the street begging for candy! Zut Alors!
MountainMornings 