Halloween in Guate

Today is Halloween, even in Guatemala, and I am missing the Midwest for the first time in over two months. I confess I had grown inordinately bored with all of its flat efficiency, strip malls and gray highways. But being pumpkin time and all, I have grown nostalgic. There was little evidence here save our own jack-o-lantern (carved meticulously under Mal’s supervision) to tell us it was October 31st. We kept no candy bowl, smelled no burning leaves. And there was little sign on these streets of trick-or-treaters today, save for one lone frog.







We did take the kids at Hannah’s Hope to each of the houses where their “special mother’s passed out tootsie rolls and lolli pops. It was a motley procession to be sure.



We were remembering our tradition of visiting pumpkin farms 30-some miles north of Cincinnati, riding their hay wagons, picking pumpkins from sprawling orange fields, and best of all, eating warm apple fritters with cider. I am missing all this and more of home today. The American Midwest is where, until now, I have spent my thirty-years. And for all of my boredom with its landscape, it was good to me. Indeed, “no matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there—well or poorly.” (Joseph Brodsky)

I always return to Carl Sandburg in October.

THEME IN YELLOW

I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.

(Carl Sandburg)