The past, the cold can make you stronger

I just found out, Margaret Atwood, the author, is good at more than one genre. I read a book of hers called The Handmaid's Tale back when I was in the Creative Writing program. I say "back when," and really it was only two years ago when I left it but it seems like a longer time, enough time, at least, to change the course of my life. That novel by Atwood is a dystopian, post-apocalyptic account of a human society in which women can't easily have babies anymore. Rich and influential women take handmaids, instead - like the story of Sara and Abraham in the Bible. When I read it I was amazed, and I just couldn't stop reading because I wanted to know what would become of the handmaid who showed me her story, because she was unnamed and could've been anyone, even me.

But I've also just heard Garrison Keillor read a poem by Margaret Atwood, "In the Secular Night". Atwood as poet lets in on what happens in those unaccounted-for hours, what my mom calls "the wee hours of the night," when a person is less structured. The poet mutters to herself as she walks upstairs, eating a bowl of baby lima beans and cream with her fingers. She mutters and contemplates things that, like miraculous epiphanies, only come together when one has been awake long enough into the night. And of course, like every writer, she waxes nostalgic for a spell inside the poem.

I was just telling my husband the other night, in one of those rambling monologues I subject him to because I see no one but the dogs most days, that nostalgia and the past are inescapable for me. I can't hear, read, smell or watch anything without being kicked back to the first time, the formative moments of that spice or movie where I applied it like lipstick to the experiences I was having. But this is good for a writer. The ability to see the past as a catalogue of events meaningful when strung throughout each other in myriad ways is, indeed, what charges writers to write. The recurring themes, images and symbols in a single life and even throughout history beg for significance, so we write them into story.

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It's getting cold below the southern mountains, finally, even though November is well on it's way. Just two days ago, though, I was bearing my legs in cutoffs again, albeit with boots up to mid-calf. The little black spiders, frequently sighted on the ceilings in summer, even thought it was okay to parade about in the open again on floors and walls. I hadn't seen a spider in the house for at least two weeks, and I was quite content with it that way.

For me, no spiders is about the only good thing that comes out of cold weather. It's hard to do anything but sit balled up under a blanket, or bundled in too many clothes for real comfort, when it's cold. So, I try to see the cold weather as a challenge, something that will make me stronger and more resilient. I make myself go for runs in the cold, because it makes the body stronger. Also, I try not to let that holiday languor set in and ruin any useful line of thinking.

Tonight is going to be another cold one, but it's Friday, and that makes everything just a little bit better. Daniel and I are headed to one of our usual haunts, the Hare & Hound Pub and Restaurant in Landrum, SC.

But first, I'm going for a run with some friends. Don't worry, I'm layering on some Underarmor for this one. I might even wear pants instead of shorts.

Plans and Pancakes

No longer the open meadows of thought, free and green for sitting and smelling, holding a watermark concept up to another for a starker, more meaningful picture. Not, at least at a time like the end of a fall semester, where any stray thought must belong to research paper or project formulation and not traipsing in the Free Meadow of Creative Thought. Textbook phrases, quantitative data, and professors' monotones and exaggerations crowd in, demanding their priority as "school things" and "the future of my career."

I'm not really a list person. I mean, I work better with lists, and more efficiently. Yet evening after evening, I fail to make any real sort of schedule for the next day. There is something cage-like about scheduling, and no matter how smoothly things go because I managed a plan beforehand, I never make it habit. So my mind can be found floundering and inconstant as to what I should be doing with my time. The silent, monstrous zeppelin floating over my tooth-brushing, my teatime and my walks to the mailbox, is that I should be doing something for school.

But I do have to have other things, things that get me to the teatime from the tooth-brushing, and to the schoolwork as well.

About a month ago, I bought a 49-cent copy of the novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier from a Salvation Army, on a whim because I have sort of always wanted to read it. My English teacher in high school assigned it to some of her classes, but for whatever reason she didn't assign it to the one I was in. When I opened to and read the first page a couple of weeks ago, I had already been reading another book on my Nook, but the plot was slowing up. Reading, waiting for something to happen in that Nook book, was like searching for arrowheads in the backyard.

Reading Rebacca has been just the distraction I've needed. It's a haunting mystery that was written in the late 1930's, and the protagonist is a young woman, awkward, thin and pale, who falls in love with and marries a widower almost twice her age, and goes to live on his estate. But no matter what she does, the girl cannot escape the ghostly memory of Rebecca, her husband's late wife who was killed in a boating accident. Or was she murdered?

Okay, obviously this is a purely self-indulgent read. But who doesn't need those? I'll finish the other book, of course, which is Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. I have a nasty habit of starting and rarely finishing - whether it is in reading or writing. So, I'm trying to shake this.

Swamplandia!, as it happens, is actually a really good book, just slow near the last quarter.

As a last note, I want to mention that I made pancakes yesterday morning, just for me and no one else (especially not the dogs). After smattering them with butter and maple syrup, I sat in the quiet at the end of the kitchen table, and indulged my breakfast fantasy (which is, it so happens, a rather dominant one). I thought of this blog, a namesake of the morning pancake, and let my various, schedule-less selves settle and resolve into a complete girl-woman-creature. I found a moment, and heard my voice, singular and peaceful, in my head.

My voice, no one else's.

Goodbye Hallowe'en: a past perfect and past present holiday

It is tragic - I must take down my Halloween decorations. Well, I guess not must, but should probably. I do love All Hallows Eve, but if I had all the trappings of it hanging around all year it just wouldn't be as special and fun.

My morbid yard, alas, must return to normal

Halloween was off limits when I was a kid. Because my mother had dabbled in what she called witchcraft when she was a teenager, when she began going to church with her grandmother - the only religious person in my mother's family - she gave up the usual things it is said you must give up when you become a Christian, including Halloween. So, naturally, as her children, we were allowed to dress up (mainly as Bible or history characters) and go to the church fall festivals, but never trick-or-treating. 

It never bothered me really, until I was a teenager and became interested in all things fantasy - especially elves and fairies - and wanted to dress up and go out with my friends. I was also interested in Celtic and pagan traditions and holidays, which included All Hallows Eve. I had read about Halloween, and even in those tracts from church casting halloween as demonic I found it darkly intriguing and mysterious, something forbidden in earlier years and therefore all the more enticing. 

 More creepy decorations

Now that I have my own life and my own house, I will celebrate Halloween every year. I enjoy the shifts and layers that it has acquired throughout history. Some historians believe it could have originated  in Roman festivals and and feasts of the harvest and the dead, but it is more widely associated with the Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-an). Deriving from an irish word samuin, meaning end of summer, Samhain was a harvest festival falling an the first day of autumn, and was the most important of the four quarter celebration days in the Irish and Scottish medieval calendar. People also believed that it was a time when the everyday world and the realm of the magical and spiritual were closest. Christians and the Catholic Church also influenced Halloween with their All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, a time for honoring and praying for the souls of the dead. Many would wear masks and other costuming so as to disguise themselves, following lit candles held by others on their way to their place of worship for the next day.

Pumpkins on my table

I think you can disregard what anything has been in the past and accept it for what it is to you now, including Halloween. But, I prefer to keep the doors of history open and, perhaps, the door to the magical realms open as well. Halloween has the qualities of an ancient old town like Dublin, Ireland. Walking down Dublin's streets, you can see a each layer of its long life throughout civilization, from the cobblestones and Dublin Castle of the medieval times, to the many colorful doors of the Georgian era, and hundred-year-old buildings housing cellphone stores. There are aged pubs that still bear the original name from the times of the Irish kings, but show Gaelic foorball games on their flat screens behind the bar. 

Worlds and ages meet and commune on one night, Hallowe'en. 

So, to celebrate it this year, I had my first Halloween party. This is mainly why I spent so much time on decorating. It was largely a success, except for the part where my high school girl-crush walked in (whom I invited but hadn't seen since, well, high school, during which I was much too shy to talk to her) and I am sure that at that moment I was probably the most awkward person she had ever talked to. (Hi Anne, glad I got the awkwardness over with). I managed to get a few pictures of the costumes. Oh, and I'm a new Instagram user due to my sister persuading me to sign up, so the pictures are all at least 45% hipper than their original form (not an official percentage, I just made it up). 

 A Paul Bunyan and Blue Ox, a Margaret Tennenbaum (my sister), a Christmas sweater couple, and a best friends heart.

I was a Victorian ghost, and my husband Daniel was a John "Hannibal" Smith from the A-Team.

Hell yeah. 'Til next time.