It’s a windy morning, Halloween weather, mixed overcast and rain, gusts pushing the clouds around. I love windy Octobers, especially nights, clouds blowing across the moon, the feeling that anything is possible, anything can step out of the shadows.
Halloween was my favorite holiday as a child. It had an excitement: the scary night, pictures of cats and bats, going from house to house trick-or-treating, the colors, the candlelight. Drawing a face and carving the pumpkin, making a goblin from a gourd. I still have that feeling, as a grown-up witch and writer. I’m still that four-year-old who wanted to go out with the big kids, wear a costume, go into the night.
There’s something about the power of costume, this season. I think of my mother dressing up to go out with my father, when I was young, putting on the important flowered-silk blouse and the heavy earrings and cologne, kissing us good-bye, as if she were going to some high ritual. She carried the power of high femme.
Witchery appeals too to that high-femme place in me, not least because of the costuming and props: the black dress and cape, the pointed hat, whipping in out of the darkness on a broom. A witch carries the power of the scary stranger in black, coming in from darkness. I grew up wanting to be a witch because I read so many fairytales, with witches the only feminine power untrammeled by men.
Even now I like to carve my coterie of goblins out of my pumpkin squad. I make them not art but sharp-toothed little monsters.