Kage Baker is, as ever, the solar battery that drives my writing. And as I am hoping to resume some of that, and try to make for the fact that I have spent most of this year in a funk, I needs must blazon her name at the beginning of these posts.

Kage loved all the trappings of Halloween, so much so that she celebrated it for the entire month of October. No sooner – she loathed the displays that began when the summer was not yet gone; where you had to fight your way through the back to school crowds just in hopes of scoring a handful of Milky Way bars.

She didn’t care for cats much; in fact, she generally loathed them. But she was devoted to aesthetics and the rules of art; and cats are a fundamental part of the art of Halloween. What she liked best of all were what she called scratch cats: those black silhouettes of cats arched up on their tippy-toes, ears flattened back and tails brushed out like threatening brooms. She said she’d like cats a lot more if they all ran around like that. But as it would probably require wiring the little buggers up like Christmas tree, that remained a wistful imagining. She was never cruel to animals on purpose. And the sheer number of remotes that would be required was daunting. But the possible scenarios were hilarious.

Then there was the matter of the Crone. She is singular, that old mother, and I think most women know vaguely from the time of their first bleeding that it will end in the sterile tidiness of the Crone’s rhythms. And yet, most modern women persist in believing that their bodies will remain smooth and plump, their skin unwrinkled, their hair whatever shade they have chosen for themselves. They are unprepared, and walk around after age 50 with the glassy-eyed blankness of stoned gophers. And as Hamlet remarks, with unusual perspicacity for such a young man: ” Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.“

The fact that he is talking to a skull may, of course, be somewhat influencing his attitude here …

Kage (and me, too) took it for a carte blanche permission to wear anything we wanted. Of course, we’d been doing that pretty since we 14 or so – a reaction, then, to wearing school uniforms. We discussed endlessly the pros and cons of tattoos; we were for ’em, but neither of us had any money. Kage did some lovely work with fine point Sharpies, though. Our hair we left alone, as well; Kage’s red hair was destined to go gold and then as white as salt. I have been hoping for silver in my own for 40 years, now, but my hair is still obdurately brown even at age 70. I may yet be forced to dye it blue or green or something. Orchid stripes, maybe.

And so here we are, Dear Readers. I’m a crone, as is Kimberly. We have a black cat who still likes to bound around the house in a distinct horseshoe shape. And with every day that passes, we amass more bizarre candy that you only see for Halloween.

So, fueled by Necco wafers, Tootsie rolls and the weirder forms of suckers, I am watching the leaves blow back and forth through the iron bars of the fence. When it gets dark, I’ll watch the stars – in this season, they too wash back forth, over and through the black limbs of the leafless trees.

It’s a good season to be a crone, Dear Readers.