![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
There were many adventures of a Hallowe'en character to be had last night, but all I managed was to go 'round the pub with my geographically nearest old friends, and then trundle over to the neighborhood bonfire in the rain.
How wicked is it to have a neighborhood bonfire, though? And real trick-or-treating. I wandered out my door at 7:30 and I'd sort of forgotten the street would be full of children, and because of the children, full of happy voices calling out to each other up and down the street. With funny little shadows skidding back and forth. There was a pocket of completely gratuitous mist lying in the dip of the road, and the rain had stopped for the moment. It was lovely.
We got properly soaked just walking two blocks to the bonfire. They'd cut back the sod in the field in a ring in order to build the fire. It was not very large when we got there, and was attended by a very small sodden group of devotees, but as we stood about unhelpfully more logs went on, and more people arrived, and we discovered that it is possible to be quite comfortable by a large fire, even in the rain.
I tried to use my surprising sense of dryness, to hypothesize that perhaps a large fire causes the rain near it to evaporate, creating a cone of drought. I thought this might be a brilliant insight into the lives of Our Prehistoric Ancestors, but the results of our experiments (holding one hand out on either side) were inconclusive.
I didn't do anything for Samhain -- even think about it really, about X., for example -- though L. gave me some peanut M&Ms that had been put on the air altar at the Vancouver ritual in his name. I ate some today, but I don't know that I felt closer to him.
All this weekend I am power-writing this bloody conference paper, alternating with solitary walks for sanity and button-saving. I might've gone to the ritual except I was in another section of Vancouver having a dirty weekend. Of which -- more anon.
{rf}
How wicked is it to have a neighborhood bonfire, though? And real trick-or-treating. I wandered out my door at 7:30 and I'd sort of forgotten the street would be full of children, and because of the children, full of happy voices calling out to each other up and down the street. With funny little shadows skidding back and forth. There was a pocket of completely gratuitous mist lying in the dip of the road, and the rain had stopped for the moment. It was lovely.
We got properly soaked just walking two blocks to the bonfire. They'd cut back the sod in the field in a ring in order to build the fire. It was not very large when we got there, and was attended by a very small sodden group of devotees, but as we stood about unhelpfully more logs went on, and more people arrived, and we discovered that it is possible to be quite comfortable by a large fire, even in the rain.
I tried to use my surprising sense of dryness, to hypothesize that perhaps a large fire causes the rain near it to evaporate, creating a cone of drought. I thought this might be a brilliant insight into the lives of Our Prehistoric Ancestors, but the results of our experiments (holding one hand out on either side) were inconclusive.
I didn't do anything for Samhain -- even think about it really, about X., for example -- though L. gave me some peanut M&Ms that had been put on the air altar at the Vancouver ritual in his name. I ate some today, but I don't know that I felt closer to him.
All this weekend I am power-writing this bloody conference paper, alternating with solitary walks for sanity and button-saving. I might've gone to the ritual except I was in another section of Vancouver having a dirty weekend. Of which -- more anon.
{rf}
