Going to try journaling again. I’ve gone back many times and read what I’ve written before and some of it makes me cringe and some of it makes me laugh, but all of it makes me remember, and that’s a necessary thing. My life may not be dreadfully remarkable, but it’s worth remembering, I feel. And I’ve spent the last few years not writing things down, not recording the things that have happened to me. That’s foolish. Foolish.
Image
Today has a feel to it of remembrance. It’s the turning of the year, the turning of the seasons on the pivot-heel of Halloween: the warm and delightful slide of summer into fall is now the chill, wetter ease of autumn through its decline, inexorably winterbound. I spent Halloween tangled up in a vibrant riot of darkness and bright color, trick-or-treating with my two year old niece. She was fascinated by the entire process, delighted by the spectacle of it, and absolutely fearless in the face of all the pageantry of the macabre. She had a ghost at her side, though, holding her hand and grinning like a loon and helping her up the steps to garishly lit porches where mummies and vampires and zombies waited with bowls of candy to bestow some upon a zebra in exchange for the magic words: trick or treat! Shades of Catrina and Maman Brigitte in my makeup and dress and in the bright purple flower in my hair, and my niece took it all in stride. Aunt Queenie’s a ghost tonight? That’s fine. It’s after bedtime and very dark, and we are out courting danger and darkness and the consequence of this is CANDY, so pseudo-dead relatives are, well, relatively benign. It was blissful to see the holiday again through the eyes of someone who was experiencing it for the first time.

Today is the aftermath of all of that, inevitably greyer and less brilliant, and that’s as it should be. But it does make me melancholy.