All Hallows' Eve

An early Hallowe'en post.

All Hallows’ Eve

The mosaic tide of rusty, golden, and burnt leaves gently coasts across cold stone and hardening earth, collecting like lost trinkets in pockets beneath trunks and posts.  Once waxy and green, the vibrant decaying flesh finds magnificent splendor in its final hours, it’s the smell of nature’s peace with the closing of another season that elicits a calendar of memories; hot apple cider simmering on the stove, warm spices for baking, hills of orange pumpkins nestled in their yellowing green vines, ripe for the picking.  The final October sun sets on the witchy eve, as clocks tick and tock and chime the All Hallows’ call, summoning angels, thieves, fairies, ghouls and goblins to undertake their wicked crawl.  Porches house and windows frame the burning Cheshire cat grins and sinister horseman brows, carved on the plump faces of Jacks, as haunting green scepters trail an alien glow along dark pathways and within dimly lit portals.  Distant howling sets rounded ear on point, as an undistracted focus attempts to distinguish between a neighborhood dog’s desire to be stretched out before a warm hearth and the warning howl that bellows from Hell’s Hounds.  Muted feathery gargoyle guardians perched on high branches and within knotty trunks, cautiously watch with wide eyes as the Shadow People creep and skip, dancing a peculiar rhythm that keeps time with the willowy voices and child-like laughter that resonates under the vellum thin veil that for this one night is lifted, allowing the dead to walk amongst the living and the living to masquerade as the dead.