13 Days of Halloween: #13 October

This piece was originally written for and published in The Times-Leader newspaper in 2012

“These are days you’ll remember,” sings Natalie Merchant in the 10,000 Maniacs song. Though the lyrics mention May, I think of fall memories when I hear it. There’s something beautiful and yet surreal about this time of year. I’m comforted and at the same time a bit anxious.

When I was a little girl, before $4 gallons of gas, my family would take Sunday afternoon drives. In the fall this meant going to look at the leaves. Sometimes we’d head out to Geauga County, other times toward Madison or Geneva and Ashtabula. We would often stop at the cider mill in Perry, and this is where it got good. The mill had pressed apples for decades—maybe even a century--on a big, stone wheel. The air was tart and crisp with just a hint of vinegar. Families like ours watched, oohed and ahhhed and filled up gallon jugs of cold, biting cider. Note to the FDA: to this day I’ve never gotten sick once from drinking real cider.

My ex-husband and I had a similar annual ritual. On a crisp October Saturday, we would take a drive south from Rochester into the Finger Lakes region. We picked up a picnic lunch and took it to a hilltop park near Bristol then meandered our way back to a Webster farm market where we bought homemade fried cakes for Sunday breakfast, a gallon of fresh-pressed apple cider and a pumpkin or two for carving.

Maybe it’s the immediacy of October that brings on that anxious feeling. The harvest has to be in before the frost. It’s Mother Nature’s last dress up party of the year, and it comes and goes quickly. Sometimes the landscape changes within a couple of days, trees bare after the first cold front wrestles its way in. Darkness drops earlier, without the lingering tendrils of twilight in July.

Halloween is like a warm-up to the holiday season next month. It’s festive but in a dark way, with candles lighting spooky jack-o-lanterns rather than family dinners.

I went to a great Halloween party when I was a senior in high school. Two friends who were artists hosted, and the decorations were amazing—the stuff you can do with Jello! But what really stands out for me that night was the drive over to Sheila’s house: a twisting road through woods and beside a creek; flashes of kids in Darth Vader costumes holding light sticks and glimpses of other trick-or-treaters (I hope) darting along the sides of the road; a brisk breeze swirling leaves across my windshield and the path of my headlights. I was in the Twilight Zone.

Years later, at another Halloween party, a friend and I discussed the holiday. The costumes, we decided, were what really made it fun, albeit kind of creepy. If done right, no one knows who you are. Curious adventurers that we were, he and I speculated about and plotted a very cool Halloween trick using a gorilla costume. It’s on my bucket list, so be warned.

It doesn’t get any better than scaring the beejeebies out of people for a good cause. When I worked for a community development agency in Rochester, my boss owned an old fashioned brick firehouse down the street from our building. Part of the first floor was leased out for office space and part for a warehouse, but John thought the dusty maze of storage rooms and loft space upstairs would be perfect for a haunted house, and it became a favorite fundraiser.

Volunteers planned, configured and built for 12 weeks before the one big weekend where everything was put into motion. Blasts of air came out of walls; a chain saw dude in a goalie mask ran around the warehouse; large rubber rats popped out of garbage cans; a crazy granny brewed a stew of body parts (ugh.) People lined up around the block to get in.

My tasks at my final haunted house were to hang out in the loft swinging a large ghost through the air on a pulley. When the group of people below relaxed because the ghost was kind of lame, I buzzed a giant fuzzy spider spanning six feet across right over their heads. Screaming, scrambling and shrieking ensued without fail. Ah, good times, good times.

Why is it that fall days are those I most remember?  Maybe the winters are too long, the summers are too hot, and spring is a fleeting transition between them. This Goldilocks thinks fall, with all its intensity of color and last hurrah, is just right. Bundled in my favorite sweater, it’s the time to enjoy the beauty, celebrate the bounty and take a drive down Memory Lane.