Love List: October
impossibility | glittering fragments | the toothed moon
The night we climbed the hill on All Hallows’ Eve, my youngest son was still a toddler. Too little for trick or treating, but big enough to be charmed by the eldritch glow of a carved lantern on our doorstep, and thrilled at the thought of an adventure in the dark. Primed with marshmallows, head torches, flasks of hot chocolate, and pumpkin-shaped biscuits, my friend and I set off with six small, excitable welly-clad children between us.
Back then, our celebrations were simple and food-based: cut out biscuits, spiderweb-topped cupcakes, green pea and mozzarella ‘slime’ soup (so convincing that one friend reported back to his mum: ‘in their house, they actually eat SLIME!’). But this year, my teenagers will be out trick or treating with their friends and my youngest has already annotated the calendar in huge letters: ‘HALOWEN’. It’s his favourite day of the year, he tells me, planning a zombie costume and anticipating the sweets he will amass.
On the night we climbed the hill, his hair still fell in soft curls and he wore yellow and navy striped boots, a swiftly disappearing bag of marshmallows in the pocket of his yellow gilet. He walked ahead of me on the woodland path, chatting to his friend in her purple duffel coat, lighting the way together—head-torches worn at ever more precarious angles. The leaves were half green, half gold, and the air was chill, the seasons still predictable in their changes. When we stepped out of the woods, through the stile and onto the hillside, the dusky valley was spread below us with scattered lights beginning to twinkle on. Six voices filled the still air with whooping—they chased each other around the hill, hid behind trees, jumped out and laughed. I sat on a bench beside my friend, looking out over the landscape as the town was gradually illuminated.
The children grew hungry and gathered on the grass beside us, sipping hot chocolate from chipped enamel mugs and dunking biscuits. Suddenly, a bat swooped out of the gloom, diving for insects just above our heads, and they squealed with excitement as if we had arranged its arrival as a Halloween surprise. It passed silently back and forth over the hill, wings silhouetted against the last of the sky’s light. We watched the bat until it disappeared—liminal being—into the dark trees. In our stillness we hadn’t noticed the fog creeping down but standing to leave, we turned and found the hill wreathed in low cloud, the wood above filled with a silvery shimmer of fog. Torches wavering through the grey, we made our way slowly back along the usually familiar path, the ordinary made strange all around us.
On All Hallows’ Eve, a night where unexpected things can happen, I sometimes wish I could step back into the memory of that pure and unexpected moment with my children still small, their happy voices echoing around a hidden hilltop, their torch lights flickering in the fog.
Here’s what I’ve been reading and loving this month:
Fiction
We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman
It’s difficult to describe this novel without saying that it was the funniest book about death I have ever read. It centres on best friends Edi and Ash; Edi is in a hospice being nursed through her last days of terminal cancer and Ash is caring for her. If that immediately sounds like a book you don’t want to read, I hear you! I felt the same, until I heard Catherine Newman speak to
about her writing process and the laughter and love behind it. Listening, I understood that comparisons to Nora Ephron are justified.Catherine Newman writes with warmth, wit and humour, and as much as the story is about Edi coming to terms with dying, it is also about Ash learning how to live. In this novel hilarity and heartbreak are messily, and realistically, interwoven. The author captures relationships with tenderness and truth: Edi and Ash’s long friendship, their imperfect marriages and Ash’s complex connection to her grown-up children are all wonderfully realised. It is a story of love and loss but also an uplifting celebration of the differing paths we take to meaning and happiness. Catherine Newman has achieved the seemingly impossible: a book about death that is brimming with life.
Non-Fiction
Cacophony of Bone by Kerri ní Dochartaigh (my copy of this book was gifted)
‘…every single day of this ghostly, dream-like year has felt like winter, like those days on which the fog arrives, refusing — over and over — to leave.’
spins words into wonder and writes prose like a poet. I looked up from this book to find that the world appeared different, as if it had suddenly been pulled into sharper focus. Moths and birds flutter through the pages, which are soaked in salt water and bathed in moonlight. There is so much light all through the book—Kerri ní Dochartaigh (whose obsession with light mirrors my own) reveals it in words better than anyone I have read. She has caught light and pressed it, so that when the book is opened, it glimmers and glows.Cacophony of Bone charts twelve months lived in a small stone cottage in Ireland. The year was 2020—that strange, contained, frightening year of the pandemic spent in intermittent isolation, a year of both change and stagnancy. This is a book concerned with cycles and growing, with memory and ‘haunting, unknowable time’. Cacophony of Bone is a year of life collected in glittering fragments, gathered and displayed like the wild treasures that Kerri ní Dochartaigh brings home from her walks. She has a lucidity of seeing, and an intensity of being that makes reading her work as brightly refreshing as stepping into the cool, silky sea on a hot, still day.
Online
I’m obsessed with light all through the year, but in the autumn and winter months, that feeling intensifies. The light now is more elusive but it has a sharp, clear beauty that is different to summer’s languid incandescence. On sunny days, I track its progress across my loft-room office walls, opening my little window to see the last of the golden beech leaves shimmer and shine. I loved this piece by
on chasing light in the darker months of the year:
Poem
A Louise Glück poem seems appropriate for this month and I’ve chosen All Hallows, a poem as haunting as any ghost story, with simmering sadness in the darkening hills under the ‘toothed moon’. The final line makes me shiver. You can read the poem here.
And finally, on the topic of All Hallows, I loved this list of gentle Halloween traditions from
and this gorgeous post about the witchiness of motherhood from .My October loves.
Thank you for reading, and for your continued support.
Laura x
Laura, your writing soothes me. I also always love your recommendations. Thank you ♥️
What a gift this morning! You write so beautifully AND the bonuses of what you are reading and seeing. Thank you for the weekend primer.