What Halloween kid was the best?! The little boy who saw Trash and exclaimed, "I didn't know cats could trick-or-treat!!" The two doors down neighbor's two year old who was dressed as a giant avocado and got overwhelmed so he went toddling away back toward his house as fast as his little legs could carry him? The same neighbor's 13 year old daughter who was left home to pass out candy being deemed too old for trick-or-treats, but who snuck over to the porch and asked "Could I please trick-or-treat here just really quick?" (I gave her as much candy as she could carry; it's hard growing up and people deciding you're too old for stuff you still love!) Or maybe it was the little tiny boy who just showed up at 9:50pm on a Monday night in the pouring rain after the lights were out and when I gave him the rest of the candy, he yelled "WOW!" I love this stupid holiday. I love this neighborhood and this house. I love that the house loan just came back approved at a gigantic interest rate. 

 A perfectly dreary, spooky, rainy little Halloween. I went for a run and my crows were out in force. They seem to like the wet weather, or maybe the fact that the graveyard is so quiet on stormy days. My winter oyster mushrooms are popping up again, which is nice to see. I think I'll give them a couple days and then harvest some. I have really nice butter and I bet they'd be good fried up and put on a nice piece of meat.

I was having such a nice time on my run in the pouring rain that I was startled when the lady who runs the graveyard pulled up and asked if I needed a ride home. I was briefly confused and then she was like "oh wait. You're out here on PURPOSE?" But what is life without an occasional rainy run? It will soon be too cold to do it. Running in the snow is fun but difficult, and sometimes it's falling too hard and gets in my eyes. I had this moment coming back from Elkhorn, seeing the piles of nicely cut and stacked wood and the little cabins with smoke coming from the chimney where I felt excited and happy for winter, not horribly depressed about it. But I'm in an odd little mood these days. 

Tonight I'm really looking forward to handing out candy; I'm hoping the rain doesn't spoil everything. I want to put on all the string lights and fill the yard with candles. I don't think I'll dress up (as a practicing witch, my culture is not a costume! Just kidding, it totally is.) but pretty much most of the stuff I wear could pass as a costume so maybe I'll put on one of my witchier things. 

 Well, I absolutely butchered the soup, but otherwise, I felt happy as a little trout out in the cold, bright woods this weekend. I think the problem was the big cast iron cauldron I used; it's new (okay, it's probably older than I am, but new to me) and though of course I had washed it out, I think it still had a really gross sooty flavor sticking onto it. I actually took my time cleaning it and oiling it after that mess, and when I made a side dish of polenta grits later in the camp, the flavor was really good, so hopefully that will be the resolution of that.

Otherwise, the woods were golden, the sky was creamy, and I liked to wander off into the woods and listen to the quiet. The leaves were falling in a way that sounded almost like rain, but it was quite dry. It was one of those camping trips where it actually felt good to sleep, in spite of my mismatched mess of blankets and underweather sleeping bag and big heavy hog dog. Last night, everyone went to bed but I was still really awake, so I sat up by the fire, reading my dumb poetry book by candle light, listening to the woods: the clicking of the leaves falling around me, the soft sounds of the low fire, distant coyotes, my friends quietly fucking in their tent a little ways away from me, occasionally an owl. The last time I was camping in October like that, I remember seeing so many stars fall - flashes of light like lightning over the mountain. Last year, I wrote a very overwrought poem about it. 

You'd think I'd be tired of the woods, but of course I'm not. I should be at home cleaning my porch for the trick-or-treaters, but I think I'll go out to the villa a little bit. I haven't gotten tired of the falling leaves or the color, and I'm dreamy lately, soft and full of feelings. 

 Oh, a two post day. But I need to write about something else to see how I feel about it. So I had to go through all my costuming stuff, thinking of a particular skirt I wanted to dig out. It all smells like legends and makes me feel all kinds of big emotional things of which I could ramble on about a long time. But here's the funny thing though: I found my old in character journal that I kept during the first few years of larp and then, after, "donated" to the INC library when we had such things in the later part of the game. I hadn't looked at it since the end of the game some... god, 7 years ago? And beyond the happy memories of those first years, I noticed since its time in the "public library" of the game, people had obviously gone through the journal and written things on the last pages I'd left blank. Drawings of my character, funny little messages, doodles. 

And then, on the very last page, out of any other context, just the scrawled word "CUNT"

I admit, I laughed. That word, that one that's supposed wound so viciously, so specifically female, so pointed and aimed. I wonder who it was, which one of the people who came to the final years of the game wrote it and why. The joke is on them a bit - I like that word. I eat that word for fucking breakfast. And really, it's not exactly news to me. Cool story, bro, tell me something I don't know. Did the person think anyone can feel worse about me than I do?

But I suppose maybe I am a little bit upset because I closed the journal without ripping out the page, put it carefully back among my blue armor, leather pieces, scraps of fur, and came upstairs to write this. 

 Hard not to feel light and optimistic with these gorgeous fall mornings. Though I still can't drink a lot of it, I've rediscovered how much I love a cup of hot coffee, especially on one my front porch with the light warm in my hair and the graveyard practically glowing with all the fall color. 

This weekend contains a rare gift these days: Elkhorn. I'm going to put on my raggy larp skirt, put down a rug, and use my giant cast iron cauldron to make a beef stew all afternoon tomorrow. I wonder if the creeks will be flowing again. They get so still in late August, and we haven't really had the rain. It will be cold; I'll bundle up. 

Things with the house are progressing suddenly quite quickly. I'm trying not to get too excited. The next step is the home inspection; a lot could go wrong there. I'm also trying not to get too deep water scared about taking on debt after spending so much of my adult life trying to get out of the ridiculous debt I got into as a seventeen year old. There's also some paranoid, feral part of my brain that is deliriously ready to be legally tied to a place. No one can make me leave. I won't be homeless if my life totally falls apart again. My home won't get sold out from under me. Ehh, it might collapse out from under me, or catch on fire, but... 

But let's not think about that right now. It's exciting to look around the house and imagine projects. All it takes is infinite quantities of my time and money!

Oh, here's something to write about: did some time travel last night going to Chappie's bar for the last time to get my mug back, since they're closing. That mug has haunted me; a beautiful dark forest green with a wyvern built into the side by my friend who is an art historian...probably almost ten years ago, now? At least 8. Back when I went to the bar there a lot, it made sense to keep it there, but then the owners started saying a lot of really upsetting political bullshit, getting drunk all the time and running off his mouth about women and queers and stuff, and it got less fun to hang out there. I really wanted my mug back, but I didn't want to go in and ask for it. "Hey, I'm never coming here again, can I have my property back? It's special to me." I guess another person would have just said that. But anyway, now that they're closing I got it back, and I was able to scrub off the name of whoever had obviously been using it in my absence. It's funny that I had been so delicate about the situation, and in the meantime they had literally written over my name. Fuckers.

The night felt like my past somehow, though. Walking around downtown in the cold, all the tourists gone, the leaves swirling around and making a clatter. I got home and dreamed more detailed, textured dreams full of scents and feelings.

 

 There are honeybees all over the tattered remains of my garden. I guess they're fueling up while they can for one last seasonal hurrah. It was a beautiful morning - all wet and foggy, with the colors in the trees very, very bright. A good day for running, too. I think I'm slightly faster now that the temperatures have dropped. It feels good, though my legs are sore. 

Since Spain, I've been having the most intense dreams. They feel so textured and realistic, even moreso than usual. I dreamt about running into someone by a creek and it wasn't just how real the creek is, the way the light plays on it, the rocks below the clear water and the dappled way they look, it was the aspects of the presence of the person - the feeling of a shirt, a smell, a particular unique way of feeling around them. That's a simple example of what I mean, but it is striking. It has such a lingering effect.

I'm bad today and just playing around with my stories instead of accomplishing much. I should at least get something done around the house if I don't want to be good at work, but I'm not doing that either. 

 When the poet Lorca fled to Granada, he thought he would be safe there, but he was betrayed by friends and murdered by fascists. While I guess it's not different than any of the histories I live alongside, it seems like every historical site or exhibit in Spain ends something like that. Don't you love to see the white lime cave home that line the cliffside? This is the spring, this is where they grew herbs, this is where the animals lived in a cave adjacent to the living quarters so that they helped to keep the cave complex warm in the mountain winters. And then, invariably, the last exhibit is how the people were rounded up and shot in the early 20th century. Spain has a dark history, like everyone else, but maybe with so much of it being recent, it all feels much fresher.

I found Granada to be a beautiful city: a city of fog, tea shops, and night-blooming jasmine. I bought jewel green harem pants in the street. I covered my shoulders and tattoos and paid coins to light candles in the cathedral. I climbed up inside the Alhambra and dreamed castle city dreams afterward. The bars were very good. They have "authentic" tapas culture there - allegedly the last place in the world to do so. You order a drink; they bring you a little unique snack. Another drink, a different snack. And the bars compete to have a different or better style, and therefore encourage patrons to linger specifically at their particular bar. There was a lot of odd prawn potato salads, little elaborate sliders with lamb, little meatballs, slices of ham and cheese... The wine was good and very cheap. Thick, dark-dark reds. 

Flying is one of those unpleasant surprises of things that get harder as you get older. I've never really particularly liked it, but now I seem to have the extra new side effect of it making me violently ill afterward. I suppose it's motion sickness. Always interesting to land in a new place, disoriented and jet lagged, and then spend the next six hours puking my brains out. It's a dismaying development since all I really want to do with the rest of my life is wander around and look at the world. 

Well, I stumble, barfily, out of the desert of the Sierra Nevada and emerge back here in the mountains of Virginia into the most incandescently beautiful fall.

Madrid is a city of balconies. People are always hanging off of theirs: smoking a cigarette and looking gorgeous. Mine is off a floor to ceiling window ledge, so it's only about the span of my foot and three stories up. Standing out on it to look over the rooftops makes me feel dizzy and weak in the legs. But it's very nice to open up the big windows and sit just inside of it, drinking a glass of cava.

 I've been to now six different European nations and learned to take for granted that everyone would speak perfect English, even in tiny Greek villages full of shepherds. Not so here. It's not just that my eight years of Spanish in school and back of the house restaurant work has ill-prepared me, it's that they think I'm actually French - a new layer of complication. 

 I left my pale blue scarf in the Whiskey Jar downtown. How many of my scarves will restaurants in that town take from me? I suppose I should be happy that it was as gentle with me as it was as I skittered around the outskirts. The winery ruins were beautiful by moonlight. I didn't dance at the wedding; I hung on the wall and swished my long dress around barrels and tables, drank glasses of strawberry-colored sparkling wine. In the morning, I walked around Whole Food with this idea that I wanted something, but I wouldn't know it until I saw it, and not finding it, I frantically bought coffee, pieces of cheese, fancy fresh squeezed orange juice and then rushed home across the mountain. The woods were waiting for me: dark and golden and fragrant. I walked through stands of hickory, pine groves, and finally old, twisted cedar. 

And now, I'm supposed to be packing but instead I'll go for a long run. I have a busy afternoon of meetings and more vet shit and then finally I can put on my apron and make one last nice meal before I leave my kitchen for the foreseeable future. 

It was worth being alive to see the night creep into the woods off the Middle River last night. This time of year, the light changes color in such a strange, new way. The trees glow and the air looks almost purple. And the dark comes on with such determination. As I was driving home, the glint of small pieces of glass along the road almost looked like eyeshine: green and bright in my headlights. 

I mentioned the leech and the arrowhead sifting I'd done out there, but not what I found. All my effort produced a couple pieces of nice red jasper, a piece of ceramic that I actually think might be woodfire/Native made - I see a lot of 19th century ceramic out there too, but this was unique, and a small worked piece. Not a proper point, just a flake with some chipping in it. I brought these things out of the river and put them in nooks in the giant bar Jay's made out of all these old, weird pieces of wood. I've felt less inclined to take artifacts I find away from the place I found them. I try to have a more catch and release sense of these things. 

Last night, I made this really good sheet pan baked meal thing. It's kind of like that feta block cherry tomato bake that all the kids on tiktok were doing back a couple months ago, but with cherry tomatoes, Kalamata olives, red onion, broccoli, garlic, and blocks of feta all tossed in the oven with olive oil at 400 until it bakes together. When it was done, I threw it in a skillet with some cooked orzo and tossed it all together with more olive oil and lemon juice. It takes just like this weird deep dish everything pizza from South Boston (that I think even burned down because of course it did) - all this cheesy veggie Italian flavor. 

I have so much to do but I feel pretty useless today. I desperately need to pack and in lieu of packing, I should clean my house, and in lieu of cleaning my house, I should get ahead at work since I'll be out for the next two weeks. But I'm actually just sitting at my computer eating leftover orzo and trying to decide if I want to watch the stupid Clone Wars cartoon sometime. 

 I actually just remembered I wanted to write about a dream I had last night. What's this preoccupation with dreams, anyway? Isn't it so boring? I don't know; I guess it is kind of stupid. But in some ways, they feel like portals to meaning, lifetimes I won't live, being able to touch people who have gone away, or access to things I've lost or that have simply past on, like a field I remember from childhood that is now a development. Entry back to that world is important to me.

But anyway. Last night struck me as odd not because of some vague earlier part about going up a mountain with a lot of strange imagery and significance, but later in the dream. In the latter part of it, I was living on my old house on Beverly and I was still in grad school. This professor I knew in real life came to a party and was acting somewhat badly - showed up drunk, larger than life and loud, was generous to excess with nice wine and his time, but making people uncomfortable. I had this feeling of being flattered he had come but also wanting him to leave. An overstayed welcome. In real life, he had been a prize fighter once - he had huge fists. People would say "fists like hams" in a novel, but they weren't anything like that. Boxy, hard, powerful. Nothing like ham. He was an old man with white hair, a barrel chest, and very red face. I remember he had a weird thing he liked to talk about, how he wrote every single thing that had ever happened to him his whole life in these composition notebooks and that he had closets full of them at his home. He said he could open up a book for a year, say 1967, and read everything that had happened to him and know exactly the person he was during that year. Does this interest me because of my own compulsive diary keeping? 

He died the year after I graduated; he fell down the stairs in his home in a medical event. They didn't find him right away. I got the sense he was an isolated person. I honestly haven't thought of him much since then. We were never close; to be honest, at the time, his brusqueness scared me. I craved warmth, attention, compliments from my teachers - the assurance that I was special and talented like the little narcissist you know I actually am. I don't feel sentimental toward him now because of the dream. But it made me think about something I read once about how a person actually dies twice: once, when you stop breathing, and a second time, the last time a living person says your name. But what about the last time someone dreams about you? If the man were still alive, I think he literally wouldn't remember my name. But here he is, lodged in my subconscious. Showing up at my shitty, imaginary house parties. 

Anyway. I'm going to the villa to run around the dogs. Hopefully I don't get any fucking leeches this time. 

 It looks nice out today. Fall, powder blue sky. The last of the pollinators moving over the last of my late season blooms. I looked out the window and thought that I was in a good mood, so I wanted to write it down in case later I wasn't.

The coffee maker broke, but I think I might have fixed it. I fixed the gas burner the other week too. It feels good to get a little bit more handy and able to do these things, especially as a potential future home owner. 

I should pack for the trip on my lunch break, but I think instead I'd like to go for a long run. I've felt so weak and sick and gross this week; it 'd be nice to do something active. I also need to figure out what I'm going to wear to this damn wedding. I think it's black tie, so I'll have to see what of my gowns might work - maybe my best man dress from the other wedding last year, or the gold/brown velvet thing. I almost bought a dress for it, but now I'm glad I didn't - I have enough expenses in the next few weeks. I did buy a really nice sage/moss green pattagucci. That seems like it's "my color" for all my outerwear these days, but I love green, so I don't mind. It's nice to have stuff match. Now all I need is one of those mammut puffy things... oh, I'm just being ridiculous; I shouldn't buy more stuff.

Here's something gross to counter all my soft silliness - so weekend before last, I was in the middle river sifting for arrowheads with some friends at the villa. We came back up to dry around the camp fire and I noticed some fresh blood on my leg where a motherfucking leech had bitten me. It immediately came off, but then the bite wouldn't stop bleeding. I was making dinner hours later and felt something wet under my foot, and it had bled through the third or fourth bandage I applied. Now it's been almost two weeks and I still have a huge mark that won't seem to heal. Seems like maybe something I should take care of before I go out of the country, but ugh. So gross. I guess given all the time I spend with my bare skin in rivers, I should be glad this is the first I've ever encountered. Still. I suppose it's gotten cool again and I'll probably forget my squeamishness by the time it gets warm enough to get back in the water next year. 

 Ugh, sick with an actual cold thing - not covid or anything dramatic, just a really, really shitty cold. I just need to get better in three days before I have to go to a massive wedding in and around Cville and then immediately fly out of the country. We'll see, I guess. No time to catch my breath. 

The library program went really well. I've read for blind people before, but this was the first time reading tarot for the deaf. It was cool to work with the ASL interpreter, cooler still to have my first conversations with someone that way. It was a really neat experience. And there was a huge turnout, which made me feel good. 

In the graveyard, the leaves are definitely changing. There are swallowtail caterpillars all over my rue. My parents were in town last weekend; my dad somehow managed to win over my crows in two hours when I was downtown with my mom. 

I had a dream last night that I was walking through this unfamiliar city - somewhere in Europe, a tangle of little shops - with my friend Jill from college. It was a strange dream - we were talking about missed people and I felt like I wanted to confide with her about something, a missing space, an ache, a loss - but then I started to wake up and remembered myself even in the space of the dream. I guess that all sounds vague and foolish, but it's stuck with me over this cloudy, vague nothingness of a day. 

 Rabbit, rabbit, October.