When I was a kid, late October was a time of anticipation. While most kids love Christmas most of all, I looked forward to Halloween at least as much. But Halloween wasn’t just a night for me and my occasionally delinquent friends growing up in the Twin Cities suburb of Bloomington. It was a whole month of after-dark carousing when our imaginations ran wild.
Back in those days, daylight savings time ended in October, so it was dark by suppertime. And that left us with two or three hours after supper to lurk about our neighborhoods or explore the nighttime woods along Nine Mile Creek, guided only by the moonlight.
As younger kids, before our teenage years, we invented our own world, which was full of ghosts and ghouls of all shapes and sizes. We had stories of “old Lady Kelly” an early settler in Bloomington who we understood still lived in an old house set back from most other houses in the neighborhood, along the edge of Nine Mile Creek. We had never seen old Lady Kelly, but when I was very young, I remember she had kept a cow occasionally tied to an old pump house that later became our backyard when we moved a few blocks to a bigger house in 1972. Perhaps because we had never met her before, it was easier to convince ourselves that she ate children whenever she got the chance. There was another older house in the neighborhood as well, home to old folks we never saw and every night in October we could plainly see the elongated and oh, so ghostly face of the old man peaking out from an upstairs window. We would get goosebumps just walking past the place.
These were places where none of us would ever set foot, which gave them a sort of immunity, even in our later years, from the October pranks we sometimes perpetrated on neighbors we didn’t particularly like. These were all pranks of the usual sort. I confess that we lacked imagination as miscreants, confining ourselves to the occasional egging, toilet-papering, or, most commonly, ringing a doorbell and running away. We usually didn’t run far, since half the fun was watching from a hiding spot as the neighbor answered the door and looked around for a few seconds, before figuring out what had happened. One of these a night was usually enough, since it meant we would spend the rest of the evening trying to avoid imaginary police officers who undoubtedly had nothing better to do than chase us down.
What was odd is that these are deeds we would only undertake in October. It was as if the moment the calendar flipped to our favorite month, the normal rules that governed our childhood really didn’t apply. Because it was the suburbs, we had just enough glow from the occasional streetlight for us to see what we were doing, while there were still plenty of shadows to hide out or imagine that something else was hiding, just waiting for us to get too close. It was a time when every dog bark, every cat scurrying across the street, every gust of chilly fall wind, was a portent of something dark and ominous. The bare and gnarled branches of the big bur oaks that still graced our neighborhood, remnants of the extensive oak savannah that once covered much of southern Minnesota, were always spookier in October. I imagined the gnarly claws of witches as those branches waved in the breeze, backlit only by the moon and the ever-brightening skyglow of the metro.
October, to be sure, wasn’t always about witches and other spooks, or tormenting the neighbors. The yard at the new house where we moved in the early 70s was graced by four sprawling bur oaks and the leaves fell in October by the truckload. We raked them into huge piles, big enough to hollow out as little forts and hideaways, or simply as piles to leap upon.
And when we tired of playing with the leaves, we could usually pressure my Dad to come out and start a bonfire. There was nothing so pleasant to my young nose as the smell of burning leaves and the bonfire was one of the highlights of October for us, which was made all the better when Mom brought the marshmallows out for roasting. Eventually, the bonfires went by the wayside as the city instituted prohibitions on open burning, just another step in the urbanization of a suburb that still had cornfields at the end of the block when we first moved there in 1963. Nonetheless, those are memories I’ll never forget.
And even today, when late October rolls around, I still have that urge to roam in the evening darkness, to look for those things that go bump in the night and to let my imagination run wild. And since I have two bur oaks in my yard today, both of which I grew from acorns I gathered from the yard in Bloomington nearly forty years ago, I can still see the twisted fingers of imagined witches in the moonlight. When the wind blows just right, I can still feel the occasional October shiver up my spine.