Happy Halloween

That's a Colorado moon and my first attempt at using Paint. Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. Fifteen years ago, my dad, who was a genius at working with corrugated cardboard, fashioned an entire three dimensional graveyard out of sheets of corrugated. I painted them white and added appropriate limericks and faithfully drug them up from the basement for many, many years. I bring fewer up each year - they're a little unwieldy. I' place them around the leaf-strewn yard and then make a cauldron on the front porch with 12 pounds of dry ice. Then I run a hose out the window from the hot water tap in the laundry room. Oh, yeah! We have fog drifting mysteriously around all those tombstones. It's awesome. A lighted jack-o'lantern sits atop one tomb and a cute little witch with her broom sits cross-legged on another.
I've carved as many as 12 jack-o'lanterns and placed them atop the low stone wall beside which the parents and kiddies drifted to reach the front porch. The ooohing and awwwing was worth the effort. The smiles and glittering eyes beneath those little masks and fangs and furry faces were the reward.
I've always had a little ritual wherein I move the flickering squash visages to the back deck. It seems only right to allow them their one night of smiling incarnation. Sitting by the bay window I watch them gutter and blink out one by one.

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