wild card: fifty days and counting

i am so ready for october.  i appreciate the summer with its green trees and blue skies and pretty little hummingbird that likes to hang out outside my office window, but i am just not a summer person.  i am an autumn person.  specifically, i am an october person.  i love the chill in the air in the evenings, i love the spicy, clean smell of the leaves and the beginning hints of woodsmoke from crackling fireplaces.  i love that awkward in-between time where it's not quite cold enough for the winter coat, not quite warm enough without it, so i end up going out in a sweatshirt and scarf.  i love the rusty-gold splotches of trees on the mountains.

if you know me or you've been reading this blog, this is probably pretty obvious, but i'm going to say it anyway: halloween is my favorite holiday. everyone else in my family seems to hate it or be ambivalent toward it, but i love halloween. i don't care about the candy, and i'm not super-interested in the costumes (though i will be dressing up this year and it will be a resurrection of an obscure character i dressed up as two years ago and literally no one knew who i was, so get excited about that). my favorite part of halloween is just the atmosphere. through the month of october, i read horrible books by r.l. stein and christopher pike mixed in with genuinely good ghost stories by other authors. last year it was world war z, the works of edgar allen poe, and twentieth century ghosts by joe hill.  i only watch spooky, witchy, or ghost-related movies from october first through november first.  i go to haunted houses and haunted forests and eat molasses cookies and drink warm apple cider.

a few years ago, i was a storyteller at a "haunted village" event in salt lake.  my friend chelsey was in a production of sleepy hollow that was held in the same village and my friend callie and i told ghost stories. i had a great costume-- a ruffled shirt, long skirt, and a red velvet cloak with a hood to cover my anachronistically-short hair.  we were stationed in buildings throughout the village.  some nights i was at the mill, other nights i was at a little cottage down the road.  groups of visitors traveled through the village and would come into the buildings. sometimes there were long gaps between the groups, so i'd just sit there by myself and poke around a bit.  the mill was a little boring (except for that time the mill wheel that reportedly hadn't moved in at least five years decided to start turning and i basically had a heart attack and refused to be there by myself anymore), but the cottage had all sorts of interesting historical bits and knicknacks.  because we were trying to create a historically spooky atmosphere, there were no lights turned on in the buildings-- only candles and lanterns.  there was one night, right before halloween, that it started snowing.  i went to the back of the cottage and opened the back door that faced away from the main road.  there weren't any people walking past-- just a field and more buildings lit by lanterns.  i was holding a candle in one hand and holding my cloak closed with the other, watching the snow flurries fall like little downy feathers.  i got chills.  not because it was cold or because i was really frightened-- just because it was so deliciously... haunting.

i have nothing against summer.  really.  and i really like the spring, except for all the pollen.  winter has its moments, even.  but all of those seasons are just preludes to the main event for me-- that time of year i crave for the other eleven months.

fifty days.  but who's counting?