The Fox at Dawn

It’s a couple of hours before dawn and I have laid and lit the season’s first fire in the hearth. I sit and write by lantern, relishing the fire’s light, warmth, smell and cackle. I feel like I can taste it too.  It is a portal to memory. I am happy that November is here. Halloween is one of my favorites- a celebration of generosity and creativity and community, no one asked to be worshiped or forgiven, small gifts for everyone. It’s a holiday of humor and thrills and sharing. But it’s been years since I carved a pumpkin, my daughter, grown though still living at home, doesn’t like doing it and I haven’t had the heart to do it myself. My daughter doesn’t even like Halloween. I remember feeling so bereft when she stopped trick or treating, of course she was almost too old for it anyway when she stopped. But I was so sad- another sign that childhood was over. Trick or treaters can’t find our house tucked up away from other houses, so for a couple of years after she stopped, I would go walking around the neighborhood by myself just to see all the kids and families and say hello to the neighbors. I don’t do that anymore. Now I walk the halls of the school where I teach. The holiday fell on a Friday this year, which was grand. The day was pretty much given up to Halloween with an all-school assembly, a door decorating contest, classroom parties watching Hocus Pocus and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. The whole school was in high spirits. So many laughs, so many great costumes, mostly homemade and very clever or fantastical- it was a memory making day for them. No faculty meetings after our early Friday dismissal- we were all to go home. And I went gladly, so so tired from the week, home to my cozy depression- that deep indentation in the mattress I can curl up in. 

I spent the afternoon of Halloween moving between past and present as I cleaned the living room and dining room, making room for the change of season. I thought of childhood Halloweens, my own so far away now, and that of my daughter’s. I thought of all the costumes I made her over the years and our Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen that did Halloween like no other place I’ve ever lived. One trip around the block and you had a pillowcase full of generosity- full size candy bars, caramel apples, school and art supplies. Everyone so happy, family parties spilling out onto the sidewalks, Dia de los Muertos ofrendas visible in windows. When she was four, she wanted to be a crossing guard for Halloween because we walked every day to her pre-school and we became friends with her crossing guards. It was a pretty brilliant costume- warm, visible and she could actually stop traffic. I could see people inside their cars smiling and mouthing ‘oh look at the little crossing guard’. 

She wore it to school on Halloween and we took pictures with her heroes Debbie and Emily. Debbie was delighted. She stayed our crossing guard for years.  Jess’s elementary school was closer to us than the pre-school, so once she went to kindergarten, we only had one crossing guard. Debbie adored Jess and gave her gifts for Christmas and her birthday, and we did the same. She felt like family. Emily was the crossing guard by the pre-school. She was a very tall, imposing woman who was gruff and never smiled at anyone. She did not seem to match her name. She wore a lot of armor, but we always talked cheerfully with her and after a couple of months she wasn’t so suspicious of us. When she saw Jess dressed as a crossing guard, she broke into the first smile I ever saw. Then she teared up. “No one has ever wanted to be me before” she said. And then I teared up, my heart breaking a little. The picture I took of them together twenty years ago on that Chicago street corner sits on a table in my living room. I sat with it a long time in my hands last night, remembering. I wonder if the print I gave her sits on her living room table too. I wonder if we conjured each other’s ghosts last night.

I cleaned and shifted things around to make room for the outdoor plants to be brought in, a Fall ritual that marks the end of the sun’s season of heat. Warmth will be found indoors now. Warmth will be made inside. I moved the cat tree to the front door nook that is never used at all, and I carefully moved the cacti in its place at the half of the French door that remains closed. One of my cactuses is over five feet tall, getting taller every year and harder to move. It will now spend the winter in my sunniest window. I moved the succulents to the center of the dining room table where the sun hits in the afternoon. And I moved the heirloom pothos, all ten pots of them, to their winter place on the wrought iron etagere I was given in the fourth grade for my new room at 12 Eastover Court when Mom and PeteDad were trying for a fresh start in a new house. 

The pothos spend the outdoor months on two iron plant holders that hang on the stone wall of my porch on either side of the French doors like sculptures, each holding five pots. These wall holders came from the porch at Beechgate, my mother’s childhood home in Anchorage, Kentucky, a home her father built in 1940. From there they went to the breakfast room at the Dartmouth Apartments where my grandparents moved to the top floor in 1964. Then they went to the back porch of Bird in Bush when my grandmother and I moved into the big house we bought from Uncle Jimmy in 1975. I had moved into my grandmother’s apartment after Gramps died to keep her company and because, looking back now, I needed a quiet place to mourn myself. The wall holders stayed there on that glorious, well-loved porch at Bird in Bush until Mom and FredDad moved to the Dartmouth Apartments themselves a couple of years after Mama died in 1996 and none of us ‘kids’ lived at home anymore. They hung on the same breakfast room wall two floors down from the apartment my grandparents lived in. A couple of years after Dad died in 2010, my mom moved to her current condo on Washington Square and the plant holders came to me, the plants too. And I believe, I really believe, that the plants are the ones that came from Anchorage long ago- cuttings rooted and repotted a few times over. I believe this and don’t want to find out otherwise. 

It is a yearly ritual, this moving of the plants. Halloween afternoon and evening, I moved them one by one and thought of their journeys. I added needed soil, pinched back gangly summer growth, wiped off the spider webs, watered them and set them in their winter places. I also brought in firewood and kindling, my morning plan being just what I have done- to have the first fire of the season in the morning dark and sit beside it and write. How I love this turn of the year. The dark is a comfort. I am sitting beside the fire and turning over in my mind’s eye the little circles of my family’s geography, see them loop back on each other- all the houses, Halloweens and hearth fires, all the family no longer making their own circles but alive in mine. 

I’ve been up for a couple of hours now and it is starting to get light. I can see the shape of things outside the French doors through the silhouettes of the cacti. I am suddenly aware of how hungry I am for coffee and toast.

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