~:: Spookiness ::~

Less than two weeks ago.

 Who knew so many airplanes were flying over our house all the time?  How many hundreds of strangers are right over our heads in a day?  That kind of stretches the concept of reality.

The weather itself has been almost spooky – balmy as early summer.

A few days ago.

And then the fete of Halloween, the eve of All Saints’ Day (which is a holiday I know next to nothing about – but sounds quite the opposite of all ghouls’ night).

When Cam was about ten years old he made himself a pair of beach pants.  You remember beach pants?  The eighties?  Uh-huh.  The point is that he was interested in sewing, which I used to do a whole heck of a lot more often than I do now.  So he started making things.  Shirts out of old sheets.  Pants.  Then he got older and became more interested in cars and cameras.

This is where the cautionary tale almost begins.  But first, the brag: so for his birthday a couple of years ago, I got him a straight-ahead sewing machine (as opposed to an artsy Pfaff).  And he uses it.  He sews things and fixes things and has no fear whatsoever.  L does not sew, being a sports girl and having other skill sets.  But when the kids needed crafted costumes, Cam stepped right up – designed and manufactured them.

When they asked Scoots what he wanted to be, without hesitation he said, “A fan.”  Which left them blinking.  Scoots is an expert on fans.  And fan belts.  Has been for about a year and a half.  All kinds.  All classifications.  We thought he was unique till last night when we ran into a five year old with the same fascination.  Wanted to tour our house and inventory the fans.  So, we’re not unique.  Puzzled, but not unique.

That aside, Cam got his head in the game and came up with this design.  A four blade fan.  Red.  SO cool.  And he got some fleece and made this Angry Bird (what the heck is that about, Angry Birds?) costume – pieced it together on the fly.  She hated it, but she looked SO CUTE.

Scoots demonstrates the flowing whirl of his fan for us.

And then his cuteness.

And now I will start the cautionary tale:  when the kids were growing up, there were things I really didn’t want to have as part of our micro-culture.  Guns, for one thing.  I didn’t want my kids playing with guns, about guns – just didn’t want that in our lives.  And gross scary stuff for Halloween.  Didn’t want that, either.

The fact is that sometimes, regardless of how intelligent and cool-headed your explanations are, if kids are denied certain things, they grow up to LOVE them.  And when they grow up, they GET them, whether you approve or not.  As is: Cam loves shooting.  And as in . . .

Short digression:  Chaz is Costume Woman.  She designs them.  She collects them.  She wears them.  Some are girl ones.  Some are male characters.  As she explains it, why would you want to pretend to be the princess when all they do is languish around waiting to be rescued?  Why indeed when you can run around being the prince, brandishing your sword and riding great horses astride?  So here she is in a costume often mistakenly taken as John Adams of the United States constitution fame.  But this is not John Adams.  And this is the second half of the cautionary tale:

This is a scary, scary vampire.  Complete with strange contact lenses and teeth that would NOT allow her to eat anything, much less punch holes in any kind of hide whatsoever.

This little black dog is not fooled, however.  He knows the heart inside the waistcoat.

This man is evidently not afraid of vampires either.

SO – yes, the children are gone, but the only two not showing up (out of the dozens I seem to have these days) were Cam, who had a movie shoot to do, and Gin, who stubbornly clings to this living-in-New-Mexico thing she’s got going.  But if you follow her link, you will see THE CUTEST BABY EVER.  And that’s a guarantee.  Does having cute babies fall under my cautionary lesson, for surely I discouraged the having of babies in those old far-away days.

And here is the young son, speaking of princes.  And his lady.  In costumes supplied by Chaz, supplier to the beautiful and noble.  They stepped in when Cam couldn’t go trick or treating with his family, in spite of heavy college assignments.  And then stopped by to laugh with us.

And there it was, the end of Fall.

Because today dawned (actually dawn wasn’t until about three o’clock this afternoon) chill with whipping wind and sharp-pebbled rain.  Wet, cold, nasty.  I tried to shoot it, but the nature of automatic exposure is so optimistic.  I couldn’t get a shot depressing enough – a sky glum enough.  The bats hanging from the ceiling here were dancing and twisting and flying off into the yard.

See?  That sky should look like old lead.  The trees were nearly stripped of leaves overnight.  The streets were paved with them.

This is how dark my study was at ten in the morning.  Actually it was a little bit lighter than this, but not much.  We weren’t quite night-dark, but close.

This was mid morning. Wet and slippery.  Miserable dogs.  Miserable horses.  Me, soaked in my coat when I went to the barn.  but all these pictures look so darned cheerful.  I’m a failure.  Please look at these while soaked.  Be sure to run a fan on yourself, set at no less than medium and put on the darkest glasses you have.  That should do the trick.

Arg.  So you’re just going to have to imagine it.

Good-bye favorite month.  All I can say is, may we all live to see such another, and joyfully till then.