By Caprice Lawless | Contributing Writer
By early October 2009, I had lost two siblings in 11 months. I had buried my younger sister and younger brother and sorted through all their belongings. My parents lived in a nearby city, were both terminally ill and frequently in the hospital. My only child was living on the other side of the country, enrolled in college. The economic crash of 2008 was just a year old. In it I had lost a good-paying job, along with my life savings in stocks. I could find work only as a part-time, lowly paid, adjunct English professor. My home offered me little sanctuary or privacy, as I had to rent out the spare bedrooms to strangers to make ends meet. To see Halloween candy at the store and to watch my neighbors put up outdoor decorations only underscored my grief. Halloween pumpkins were out of the question, as I was broke, lonely, and overwhelmingly sad.
My solace during that dark time was to take long, contemplative walks on the dusty plains east of my home. It seemed odd to prefer bleak fields when familiar, forested mountain trails were so close by, yet the emptiness drew me to it. The challenge before me was to help my parents toward the ends of their lives while somehow rebuilding my own. With the lonely walks, I was taking steps, literally and figuratively, to heal. On each one, my only companions were my thoughts and the sun.
Slowly, the age-old tonic of bright light, time, space, solitude, and nature began to work its power. Imperceptibly, the light began crawling toward me. On an impulse, I began collecting small, rounded stones on each walk. One by one, they found their way from trail, to pocket, then to my bedroom windowsill. I was unaware, though, of how the expansiveness of wide, treeless space had begun collecting me, as well.
The week before Halloween, from my broken heart came the idea of turning my round-rock collection into jack-o-lanterns. As unhurriedly as I had collected them, I painted them a few coats each day, using an old box of acrylics. First, I covered them in shades of orange. A few days later I added yellow stripes to signify ridges. Finally, I gave each a crown of green leaves where stems would have been, were they autumn pumpkins instead of ancient rubble.
At week’s end, as I dipped my thin brush into black paint to add faces, though, I stopped. It felt wrong to conjure happiness, to paint smiles. The next day, however, as I tried again, I felt hope blinking back at me from time spent in welcoming fields and warm sun. Cheery faces emerged from memories of my dear siblings, disguised as toothy grins for the season. They got me through that Halloween, and in each, ever-more-happy Halloween since that lonely and dark one. It was a project that cost nothing, while its value was – and remains – priceless.
Caprice Lawless has written extensively on higher education, homesharing, technology, construction, and engineering. She
moved to Oregon from Colorado in 2023, shortly after retiring from teaching college English and Journalism.