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”.

Happy Halloween.