What is better on Halloween than early morning in a spooky graveyard?
This year was a new event for me --- joining the MAC Early Birds group from my workplace for a 5:00 am walk to Lone Fir Cemetery! It was not only a chance to be at that place at that time, when the still-black night is every so slowly and reluctantly fading to gray at about 7:00 am, but was an opportunity to meet and chat with some MAC members.
Glowsticks lined the walkway in the black. Ahead was a lit tent where there was coffee, juice, water and hot tea, along with candy and cookies. We toured a couple of the graves, including the large MacLeah monument. Other MAC groups came and went --- witch hats, rocker wigs, matching princess pumpkin hats. I couldn't bear to leave so soon, so I parted ways with the groups and took a slow wander (in my nice black wool cloak) through the graveyard, surprisingly able to see in the half-light. It was beautiful, and nicely sublime, especially after re-reading The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (A Newberry Award).
At thirty and with a dead parent under my belt, some things are less scary than when I was a kid. Other things, like popular magazines, are even more terrifying. But there were a couple of spooky moments. One was a gravestone sporting a carved relief of marble, its details washed from above but shadowed by age and grime below, so that the people in elegant, antiquated dress with drooping faces resembled skeletons at first in the half-light, with dark, hollow eyes. To see it up close dissolved that illusion but replaced it with an equally eerie one, that of time and failing flesh --- the inscription on the back was beautiful, however, about "returning to the elements of which we were made" or something of the like, and quite quantum-Universal for the turn of the century!
Another scary moment occurred when simply walking between graves under the trees. In that kind of low light, the eye must be discerning when it comes to distance, paying attention to small details as best it can. My eye focused on something in the foreground, and I slowed to a crawl. Hanging erratically from a nearby tree was a very long, very thin branch, thinner and hanging lower than all the other limbs, with no side branches --- very easy to miss. It dangled down from the tree trunk at least ten feet away to near where I stood, and on its tip was a hard, sharp bud --- next year's bloom, no doubt. I moved forward carefully just to see, and yep --- the bud's pointed tip was, and I mean exactly, level with my eye.
Scary, indeed!
I grinned. "You stinker, you!"
Other Halloween events included an all-night party with friends, food, drumming, and a satisfying Osiris transformation ritual. On the Day of the Dead, Nov. 1, there was another ritual with a much larger group and a wonderfully colorful altar-of-the-dead.
Gymnastics continues, these days with steady landing of front flips and springs.
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