Happy Halloween!

I love Halloween! The witches on their broomsticks or dancing. (Okay, yes, these women from the Wolf Hunter's Coven in Germany were celebrating Walpurgis, at Beltane time, but I love them, especially now on Halloween.) The harvest symbols and the idea that the veil between the living and the dead is thinner tonight than on other nights. That sounds magical, full of possibility, especially fruitful right now when I'm writing about history. And then of course there's dressing up, the invitation to be ghoulish or dark, and candy.

This year, I dressed up as Princess Leia with cinnamon buns because this is my son's first Halloween since he discovered Star Wars and not only do we just usually dress up with him, though usually less elaborately, but we're also Gen X parents who grew up varyingly obsessed with Star Wars. What's been really interesting for me though is that since Carrie Fisher died last year -- and I had loved her books but had lost track of her when I got pregnant, meant to catch up with her books, got busy, and then she died -- I've listened to her last several books on audiobook (her voice! totally worth it!) and so have heard her perspective and stories about the movies and her part in it. So being Leia is actually sort of special to me.

I'm sorry I haven't updated the blog is two-and-a-half weeks. After hitting that personal best after being really productive those weeks, I had other things going on -- my son's birthday, especially, as well as some work stuff -- and I haven't been able to focus much on anything -- not the garden, not the poems. That is, I mostly allotted the time for writing and showed up, but often felt at a loose end and that I was just wasting my time. But partly I'm not surprised that I couldn't maintain the productivity; my experience has always been that poetry resists scheduling, that writing productivity has its crests and troughs. And though I may not be driving (to mix my metaphors) very fast, I am still toodling down the road. It also occurs to me that in the last 2/3rds of the draft, I may need to have a different approach, especially as there are specific poems I want to write -- and a great many drafts still in past notebooks that must be excavated. Going through the notebooks is probably the best work I can do, though writing and trying to catch a wisp of inspiration is so much more fun.

In the last couple weeks, we've had lots of rain and lots of cold and the garden is done, and needs to be cleaned up and the garlic planted. I haven't done any of that. Starting tomorrow, I can work on that.

No pictures this time. My son is having trouble sleeping!