Looking for the Light 4: Spooky Times

October mornings in Vermont often start with thick mist, as temperatures shift.

Three weeks until Halloween. I’m already shivering.

That’s partly because the weather’s steadily colder. We still have warm days, but they’re much shorter now, and as soon as the sun sinks low, around 4 pm each day, it’s obvious that winter’s approaching. Some morning soon, the yard will sparkle with intricate crystals of frost, and the last greenery in the gardens will bend toward the hardened ground.

But Halloween is a complicated season, full of strange humor and dark foreboding. Here in New England the taint of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and 1693 hovers in the background. A family living higher on this ridge enjoys witches and goth and black lipstick so much fun that they made a special family trip to Salem, Massachusetts, last year at Halloween to see the hauntings, the spook-taculars, the bustling shops crammed with witch-related toys and masks and more serious books on Wiccan earth-focused beliefs. As in any city, there are darker corners of all this, including people who bind their beliefs to harsh and menacing forces they conjure — perhaps out of the dark places in the human heart. I don’t “believe in” a devil, a Satan, but I’ve known my share of darkness.