September 1st

Spending the first of September fiddling and tinkering in the basement, getting ready for the big day.  Everything's going really well and I'm definitely ahead of schedule.

  

As a child, September was the ugly end of summer vacation.  I recall worrying about September by the end of each July.  The worrying practically ruined August.  I tried to force myself to savor the break from school, to mentally will the days to go slower.  They never did.

September also meant that Halloween was around the corner...  and Thanksgiving and Christmas soon after.  It felt like being bamboozled.  We had to do this one [horrid] thing in order to get these other [great] things.  I can recall asking my mother every morning "How many more days until school?"  She probably couldn't wait.

The prison routine was easy to pick up once we started back.  Before you knew it, the weather was crisp and cool and decorations for Fall and Halloween were getting hung.  We spoke of our costume plans and talked about scary movies.  Teachers shut off the lights and told ghost stories.  We made napkin ghosts and ate mellowcreme pumpkins.  

I can recall a particularly windy Fall day where I gazed out the window of a classroom that faced the wooded area that backed up against the narrow parking lot next to the school.  The window was on the third floor, so it offered a terrific view of the creek that ran through those woods. We spent so much of our free time down in those woods, and along that creek.  Leaves were flying from the trees with each gust of wind, and the trees were already thinning.  A small dirt path ran along the creek, and I found myself staring at it, imagining a classic Witch moving along it.  I swear that I imagined it so clearly that it was like watching it happen.  She hurried along, with her back to me, as the leaves snowed down around her.  I turned to a kid next to me and tried to explain what I was seeing in my head, but it surely came out as goofy, and ranty (I've seen that look a million times since then [proportionate to my rantings]).

I'd like to think that it was one of those formative moments... one of those sparks that I carried with me.  Something that made me want to build and photograph spooky props when I figured out how to build them.  Oddly, thinking about that today made me extremely grateful smartphones didn't exist back then.  Heck, the Internet didn't either.  I dread to think how having the ability to instantly view such a scene...a Witch walking along a leafy path... would have satiated my thoughts, and dulled my creativity.  And I can't even comprehend what A.I. would have done to my motivation.  I feel like so much of my process starts with "You know what would be neat?!" and to be able to google that neat thing, or to create it instantly with A.I., well, I'm thinking I wouldn't have been as compelled to build it.  

Thankfully, I'll never know the answer to that.  As I'm sitting here right now imagining myself talking to my old grade school and asking them for permission to take some photos from that window.  Looking down on that old dirt path, as I snap a bunch of photos of my Witch prop, with her back to me.  As leaves shower down around her on a very windy Autumn day.

Cheers to September!  

It's nice to have you back.