I was running down the road tonight. The air is crisp but not cold, because of the Indian Summer this year. I love where I live, on the lake. It’s where I grew up, and where I returned to as an adult. The road is unpaved, and crunches loudly in the dark. When the night is quiet, you can hear the footsteps of everything coming a long time before you can see anything. Because the road runs along the lakeshore, the houses are mostly small camps converted to year-round homes, and packed tightly. But it’s also heavily wooded. Mostly hardwood the further away from the shore you go, but all pines near the waters edge. Huge pines. Hundreds of years old, hundreds of feet tall. They are lovely. Especially when the wind is blowing off the lake and around their naked trunks. It feels wild and free. Savage.
There’s a house near the end of my run that has Halloween lights up now, orange jack-o-lanterns hung in a square shape over their fence. Just from their filtery orange glow in the darkness, I was immediately excited about the upcoming holiday. Filled with anticipation of something bigger and better than any Halloween that had come before… like the ones from childhood. Where my sister and I and all the neighborhood kids constructed a haunted house in our bedroom. With peeled grapes in a bowl for eyeballs, wet spaghetti in another for brains, and a keyboard with someone hiding behind it under a blanket so that only their arm was exposed to play the keys. Halloween seemed to last forever, when we were 10 and 7. But tonight, the Halloween lights are up and Halloween is already here. It comes and goes so quickly as an adult now. Summer, which stretched on endlessly when we were children, only lasts for 8 schedule-packed weekends. It flies by now. Everything flies by. It’s upon me before I even realize it, and gone just as quickly.
Great Halloweens and great Summers do not just happen, automatically, magically, the natural culmination of innate anticipation, any more. The way they did as a child. They have to be made. I have to make them. Seize them as they come along. Because they are here, right now. And in a whisper they will be gone again.
