Our October 2019

amazing altar candle by Gold Country Witch

October, 2019 was a crazy month here in Placerville, California. We didn't have any rain and the land was parched. When winds blew up, as normal as that may seem in some places in the fall, our state felt a collective grip of fear. Two years of record breaking fire seasons will do that to a population. Our electricity provider PG&E, being held culpable for the catastrophic fires and facing billions of dollars in liability, took the preventive step of turning off power to millions of Californians several times throughout the month. In total we had seven days without power, or about a fourth of the month. The schools closed and many people couldn't work. The girls missed a lot of class time.

For me personally, this was a little bit fun. But I am also well aware of the insurmountable hardship it caused for others. We happen to be in a pretty good position, not relying on any electronics too heavily for anything other than convenience. The outages came during warm days, so it didn't really matter that we didn't have heat, and we have camping gear to use outside for cooking and making coffee and all the important stuff. We have propane for our water heater so we could still bathe and wash dishes.
Darin even went to work and helped customers find books by flashlight. 

We certainly did not miss our chance to frolic at the pumpkin patch early in the month at 24 Carrot Farm! We like to dress in old fashioned dresses and pretend to be ghosties.  

All their pumpkins are organic and most are still on the vine. 

Afterwards we went downtown, admired the Halloween decorations up at Addie's shop, and ate dinner at Pizza Bene, where she is a bartender.

One of Lucy's homework assignments this month was a nature walk. She was on the hunt for insects, and we saw plenty, especially dragonflies!

Lucy's field trip to Coloma on October 11 came after two days of no school (Wednesday and Thursday) due to the first long power outage. Friday was an exciting day to be back together and heading directly back in time to the Gold Rush era, but the air was filled with smoke due to controlled burns in the mountains that weren't so controlled anymore. (I still don't understand why they would choose to do "controlled burns" during "high wind events," so supposedly dangerous that our power is shut off. hmm.) Down in the Coloma valley it wasn't too bad, and we quickly forgot about the smoke as we hiked up to the Marshall monument, ate snacks together, mailed letters to our friends "back home" using the old fashioned postal service, rode on a horse drawn wagon, saw campers and workers in tents, watched an old-timey funeral procession, drank Sarsparilla, and perused pioneer toys, pelts, and whistles at the trading booth.

our friend Lily was my charge for the day and such a fun companion. She was given a task from the bucket maker: to seek out the blacksmith to acquire a handfull of square headed nails, and she took this seriously until she was able to return with them and help to hammer them in! 

Cute second graders on the wagon.

Another power outage. We spent the nights cooking on our campstove outside and then listening to REI's Camp Monsters podcast (spooky stories good for the whole family) on the bluetooth speaker. 

We had a mid-October visit from Amy and the kids, including Bella's best friend Sidgie! It was Sidgie's first time in Placerville.

there is a story behind this skunk. I love having a skunk visitor, but the only reason catfood was outside at night was that a thin little sweet stray cat we were caring for had been hanging around, lying in that pet bed moments before.

That night the skunk scared her away by stamping his dainty front paws at her, and I never saw the cat again. I'm pretty sure it was that night she crawled under our house to die. Later on (November 2) finding her decomposing body under the house was something that  I'd have to deal with alone when Darin wasn't home, going into the crawl space under our house for the first time and eventually calling Joey and Pops to help me, and crying my eyes out doing so, because I felt I had failed her and also it was a nightmarish discovery. We had meanwhile found out that it was a neighbor's cat, Melody, which gave the time we spent with her more poignancy. Melody was about 18 years old and very thin and disoriented, obviously looking for a place to spend her last days. I am glad that my girls and I gave her a lot of love on October 21, the last day we saw her. The cat's owner, Trina, and I became friends as we searched for her together, hoping she had just made her way further down the street. It was an emotional experience for me to have to call Trina to let her know that I'd found Melody's body, and we have kept in touch. She even donated to Lucy's school read-a-thon and brought Lucy a little mystery book. Somehow this all feels important to mention in my write up of October 2019.

Sierra School Fall Carnival, October 26. 

My first ever trunk-or-treat. I learned that you decorate the trunk and there are even prizes given out. I made our car into a haunted library, borrowing lots of spooky and weird books from Darin to fill the shelves, and making the kids reach through spiderwebby books to get their candy. My mom came to be a ghostly librarian with me and help me give out candy, and she brought her skeleton to be a ghostly reader. We took second place!

We even gave away a few chapter books donated by Bookery!

Our friends took first place which was well earned because their Curiosities spectacle was everything.

Haley painted the sign and their daughter, Marilyn, who is one of Lucy's best friends, helped with artistic vision and designed the oracle cards. Her dad was dressed up as a fortune teller and he collected the roadkill. The bear is real!

The power went out again. We took a day to go down to Art Beast in Sacramento. 

Carved pumpkins two days before Halloween. I had class that night so Darin did all the work with the girls. They did a lot of their own carving this year and did a great job!

Halloween 2019! I had a little leopard and a dalmation prancing along with me on Main Street. Polly had been sick the day before, (thanks Art Beast) but she was feeling well enough to be a normal kid on Halloween, thank goodness. I made a huge post on my Instagram about Main street and the festivities this year, which I loved more than ever. The costumes were so creative and spirits were high. Old folks and young came out; we got to see Penelope dance; I had a quick glass on wine at Bené where Addie was a bartending bat creature, and the girls lounged at Bookery reading when they got burnt out from the crowds. 

People have been so furious about the power outages; insurance companies have been dropping those with rural homes in California due to fire danger, and I see a lot of generally disgruntled complaints on the local facebook groups. I saw many people say they wanted to get out of this state. 

Yes, October was a hard month in some ways. We missed lots of school and that was a hardship on so many families. Many, many parents weren't able to work. Businesses were closed and Apple Hill lost tons of customers during the busiest time of year. It was a strange time, and my girls were restless and they made mistakes and tried my patience and we all lost our tempers and also learned and grew together.

I love this place. I love our Main Street, and our peaceful little college outreach center where I teach, and my kids' public school. I love our neighborhood (for the most part!), the hill we live on and our house with its cedar trees and oaks and the blue spruce out front. I love that many of my friends and family have successful businesses here; they are teachers and farmers and solar company founders and scientists and toy store owners and musicians and bartenders and coffee roasters and grocery checkers and medicine makers and of course, booksellers. 

This place is filled with all the people I love and...

Even though it was a hard month, it was also a perfect month because it was October and the veil is thin. This is what the time felt like: dry cider and little friendly ghosts and golden hills charged with an air of uncertainty. It felt like crackles in the air, sparks, and sympathy. Shrugs of unknowing and checking in with each other. It felt like falling leaves making the wind king's music, forcing us to look up and around in wonder and it felt fearsome and sublime. A cat dashing like lightning across the yard. The sun shone with honor and power. One night after teaching my class at the college, where the power was still on, I drove back into town, where the power was still turned off, and it was the darkest night I've ever driven my car on a road. My headlights cut holes into the dark and I felt like there were black spirits racing alongside me and I was honestly kind of spooked. Then a homeless guy on a bicycle (yes, dressed in black) flashed by and made a sharp turn off the embankment. Police cruisers prowled. I wondered what it would have been like hundreds of years ago, going places in the dark by torchlight, with a shudder up the spine. It was a dark dark night, and it was October, and we were listening to spooky stories so I had strange beasts on the brain.

The land, even in dark dry days, is a haunted landscape of ghosts and stories, and it is home.