EARLY COMMEMORATION

This should be All Saints Day since south Louisianans moved Halloween from today to yesterday because the weatherman predicted rain would fall this afternoon. Hay la bas, we couldn't miss Halloween! To avoid the bad weather, trick or treaters arrived last night to collect their "enough for a year's supply" of those teeth-rotting goodies: Candy. Now, the devils, witches, ghosts, vampires, ghosts, spider men, and various "haints" have disappeared, some of them having been hauled away in parent-driven golf carts complete with radios.

It's time to honor the faithful departed. After a hectic week of settling in "The Berry" again, I feel the need to contemplate higher matters. "Things" were broken in my home, and we scurried around fixing them in such a huff, you'd have thought house/yard inspectors were chasing us. We've never been Garden of the Month nominees, but, still...And now, the hair police will soon be knocking on my door because during our sojourn on The Mountain at Sewanee, I let my locks grow longer than usual.  Although rain is predicted for the afternoon, I'll probably venture out to take care of the unkempt tresses and resume more hecktivity.

However, this morning I put on Mozart's Piano Concertos 19 and 20, locked the doors, and sat down to re-read Anne Morrow Lindberg's Gift From the Sea for the fifth time. Her meditations on the Zerrissenheit of contemporary women (torn-to-pieces hood) or fragmentation of their lives (even the life of one who's retired!) spoke to my condition of foolishly trying to get everything in order so I could resume living in "The Berry." 

In Lindbergh's chapter entitled "Moon Shell," she writes that mechanical aids "save us time and energy, but they're often the way to dissipate one's time and energy in more purposeless occupation, more accumulations which supposedly simplify life but actually burden it, more possessions which we have not time to use or appreciate, more diversions to fill up the void..." 

Ouch—and does a broken fridge/freezer qualify for a "burdensome possession," or did searching for and changing ice in a camp-out ice box for several days prove to be more burdensome? And could we see better in the gloom cast by all those burned-out light bulbs? From whence did the dried-up lizard in the bathtub come—and should I have left him there to join me in my nightly bath?  What about the dust of seven months' standing that threatened to arouse my allergies?  Did the mildew and mold under the carport and eaves qualify as a "feverish pursuit of centrifugal activities which only lead in the end to more fragmentation?"

Perhaps not, but Lindbergh's admonition about taking care of contemplative time resonated with me this morning. I agree with her statement: "one lives like a child or a saint in the immediacy of here and now.  Every day, every act is an island, washed by time and space...and has an island's completion."

So I'll observe All Saints Day prematurely this morning by centering down and acknowledging that too much striving for order hinders a peaceful, grace-filled life. On this day, I'll try to contemplate the spiritual bond between The Church Militant here on earth and the Church Triumphant in heaven by communing with St. Francis, whose statue guards my patio, which I can see from my study window.  I'll also remember Saint Anne Lindbergh on her island in the sky, who reminds us that "we must be still in the axis of a wheel in the midst of [our] activities...not only for [our] own salvation but for the salvation of family life, of society, perhaps even of our civilization."    

BACK IN TECHE COUNTRY AT HALLOWEEN

Civil War ghosts

Every year in October, I return to New Iberia, Louisiana after spending the Spring and Summer months on The Mountain at Sewanee, Tennessee. We always seem to arrive in time to stand on my front porch and get bitten by giant Louisiana swamp mosquitoes while handing out candy for the "trick or treaters" celebrating Halloween.  

When I was a child living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, we celebrated Halloween in a different way from young people today — we either played tricks on the neighbors (e.g., kicking over piles of leaves already raked that hadn't been burned or hiding the covers to garbage cans) or telling ghost stories on my front porch. My father always carved out a gruesome mouth on a pumpkin, and we placed a candle inside so that we had the proper macabre atmosphere for the porch tales, but to tell the truth, I never liked this holiday. I was sensitive to "scare stories" and with good reason. One summer, I had seen what I perceived to be a ghost in my grandparents' attic in Franklinton, Louisiana. In later years, my older brother corroborated this story because he had seen the ghost of my grandfather step out of a mantel clock in my grandparents' bedroom of the same Victorian-style home.

A few years ago, I published a novel entitled Redeemed by Blood that features the appearance of a ghost throughout the book. It is the fictionalized ghost of my great-grandfather and is based on the apparition I thought I glimpsed when I made this foray into my grandmother's attic against her wishes. For Halloween observers who enjoy a ghostly celebration, I'm including the prologue to Redeemed:

"I felt the same icy apprehension that I imagined the small child experienced as she tiptoed up the old pinewood stairs, the staircase rasping in protest at each step she took. I crouched in the cubbyhole of the uncompleted kitchen, a cluttered space adjacent to the landing, fenced off by a folding guard used to prevent children from tumbling down. I had been reading a narrative written by my wife in her inscrutable handwriting, a sketchy account of my entire life reduced to a nine-page booklet, hole-punched and bound with red string. The gray construction paper cover bore the numerals 1733-1916, an insipid title that could have contained the history of anyone, anything. However, it chronicled the Green family history from the time they arrived in Rappahannock River country in Virginia on the ship Macbeth until the year my wife Sarah died. I had told the history of 200 hundred years, which Sarah, the poet and journalist, condensed into an ephemeral tract and hid in the attic of a Victorian mansion in Louisiana belonging to my son Ellis Paul. The book lay on Sarah's secretary alongside my saber, the frayed gray uniform I wore at Shiloh, and a Ku Klux Klan hood, symbol of my awful shame.

"The girl who approached my attic prison appeared to be about nine years old, and her lank hair needed curling. She wore a white pinafore with a lamb embroidered on the bodice and scruffy brown shoes her mother or grandmother should have replaced before the soles came off. The child had a sweet face — a high forehead, creased in a frown, and a sharp nose lifted in pride like her Scots ancestors. I perceived intelligence in her dark eyes, and as she reached the landing, I decided to appear to her. After all, she was Dana, my great-granddaughter who had come into the world the night Sarah died.

"I moved swiftly, knocking the saber that lay on the mahogany secretary to the floor. The child glanced my way, cupped her hands over her dark eyes, and stood immobile on the landing for a moment. I felt the incandescent warmth of my body enveloping her small body for that brief instant. When I released her, she fled down the stairs, silently, rather than screaming out to her Grandmother Nell, who waited at the bottom of the stairs, that she had seen the ghost of her Great-Grandfather Dade Green.

"I sensed that the child feared punishment from her grandmother for exploring forbidden territory more than she feared me. I comforted myself with the thought that the hug I had given her had left an imprint. Perhaps I'd become the cynosure of her life, and she'd be the one who released me from my ghostly state and the memories of indiscretions I had committed during my life on earth. I resumed by task of deciphering my wife's spidery handwriting and the story about my boyhood in Virginia."

A transforming event releases this ghost from his bondage, and perhaps the story doesn't qualify for a real Halloween spin, but you can decide for yourself by ordering a copy of Redeemed by Blood! Order online from amazon.com or from Border Press, PO Box 3124, Sewanee TN 37375.