ONCE IN A BLUE (HALLOWEEN) MOON
By George Cowmeadow Bauman
It's the witching hour of midnight
on Halloween, and I'm out in our moonlit backyard, sitting with my
eerily-glowing laptop at the weathered picnic table under what we used to call
the harvest moon. It's a blue moon, too,
being the second full moon of the month.
This is the
first full moon since last winter whose light lands on the yard. Rain and wind and time have taken down most
of the leaves. The moonlight is so strong that tree skeletons are silhouetted
on the ground.
The
wrought-iron table and chairs in the yard are lit-up ghost-white, as if brightened
by exposure to a celestial black light.
The moonlight
enables a weird and disconcerting night vision.
Even scattered, fallen leaves are visibly tan against the vaguely green
ground.
Yet the
houses up and down Nottingham and over on Woodstock are all very dark on the
horizon.
I'm dark
myself, still dressed in black from the day at the Acorn Bookshop. The dancing white skeletons on my black tie are
highlighted against my black shirt.
Either nobody noticed, or a (witch’s) cat had their tongues.
The air is
still, with only an occasional rustling breeze to clatter the dry leaves
remaining on ground-hugging bushes, the last holdouts against oncoming winter
weather.
The full moon
is the first on Halloween in 46 years, and dogs are barking a few streets away,
as if this All Hallow's Eve were being scripted by Hollywood. If someone snuck up and tapped me on the
shoulder right now, I'd be instant fertilizer.
Or, if I survived, I'd be higher than the now-visible squirrels' nests
in the bare branches overhead.
This harvest moon reminds me of October evenings in rural
Pennsylvania, growing up during the 50s in an Ozzie-and-Harriet family living
out in the country. As a pre-driving
teenager I would lie back in the sloped roadside ditch of our yard, near a
smoldering pile of leaves – back when it was still legal to burn leaves and
produce that quintessential scent of autumn – absorbing the moonlight as the
huge orange orb appeared behind the trees behind the harvested cornfield across
the road. When the bloated moon slowly
lifted into the autumn sky, just above the silhouetted treeline, the heavenly
nightlight appeared so close that it seemed that if I ran across the cornstalk
stubble of a farmfield or two, I would be able to lasso a moon mountain and
become a lunar sky-rider.
Inevitably
one of the kids from the neighborhood would show up, wanting to play some
basketball, and the moon-mood would be broken.
But that was
OK; for the moment I had been sailing
around the world on the near side, the bright side of the moon.
Tonight I travel again, going back in time to when I was
living in West Virginia, managing the Bethany College Bookstore. On consecutive Halloween nights in the late ‘70s
I drove with my friend Scott across the Pennsylvania state line to the remote
North Buffalo Presbyterian Church, to sit in its elevated graveyard at
midnight.
The chapel's
setting was remarkable – atop a ridge in the rolling farmland, from which the
land dropped away quickly on both sides into parallel valleys of small farms
and narrow, valley-bottom roads running alongside small creeks.
Scott and I –
with a backpack of various supplies to last us a couple of hours – would find a
good solid tombstone in the darkened cemetery to rest against, giving us a good
view of both valleys.
The first
year we did it was to see if we could invoke something ghostly to happen at
midnight in a cemetery on Halloween. We
wanted to expose ourselves to whatever spirits might rise and rampage on this
night known for supernatural terror. The
following year we returned to re-experience a wonderfully peaceful Halloween
night.
No one was
ever around. If a vehicle did appear, it
would be spotted far off down below. We watched as its tiny twin headlights
silently wound through one of the valleys, its invisible driver perhaps turning
off onto an unmarked graveled side road, and into a farmyard, home from a
Grange meeting, choir practice, or a bar.
High on the
hill, the countryside darkness was very intense. We could see at least one light at each farm,
sometimes an all-night farmyard gas light, but here and there we could see the
window-light of someone up late, perhaps reading their Bible or laughing at
Johnny Carson, or it might even have been a barnlight where a sick cow was
being tended to.
Eventually a
farmdog would bark at something in the night, and the sound would carry not
only down its own valley, but up and over the ridge into the next vale, and
soon there would be a symphony of call-and-response dogmusic. It was delightful listening to the dynamics
of the barking, waiting to see where the eventual last bark would come from
before the scene would settle to the quiet darkness of the night.
With such
little visual stimulation in such a spooky setting, it was easy to allow one's
imagination to run a little wild on a night that tradition held was known for roaming
unearthly spirits.
Back here in my Upper Arlington backyard all sense of
potential spookiness is washed out by moonlight brightness. And the only supernatural experience is being
visited by the ghosts of autumns past...
Now I'm going to go back inside. The chill is causing my stiffening fingers to
type weird spellings, and "moonlight" could come out as "moonshine”.
