Sharon Harper, Germany, mise en scene. 1997. Courtesy the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Some weeks ago, before the first frost, before the days got dark in the late afternoon, I took a walk in an unfamiliar place. The dirt trail gave way to a narrow planked walkway flanked on both sides by high grass and brambles. It smelled like late fall, that earthy vinegar stink of rotting leaves. To breathe in the damp and leafy woods-floor smell is to breathe in decay. It’s the fertile, fecund smell of compost, of farms, hay, ammonia, manure; there’s the fermenting yeasty tang of beer. It’s the smell of humification: a word that sounds more like the process of making someone. It’s a brown-red smell, deep and dense and fungal.

I walked with someone who knew about plants, who’d tug at branches and look at the underbellies of leaves and show me what he knew. I felt lucky to learn, and tried to pay attention. The boardwalk footpath lead deeper into a boggy place, and the silence seemed to densify around us, and we tread with lighter steps. On the planked path he paused. “Sphagnum moss,” he said, pointing to a mound. I told him I did not like the word sphagnum, that it sounded like something you suffer from. “Feel it though,” he said. It was good advice. I crouched and pressed my palm into the moss. It was cool and damp and feathery, with a cushioned give, welcoming and soft. I wanted to lay my face in it, my whole body, to let the entire weight of me get absorbed into this cooling cloud of plant.

“Women used to use it when they were—” and he hesitated here, just slightly, a tiny hitch in the movement of the sentence, “—menstruating,” he said. What could I do but imagine it then between my legs.

In Old English, the name for November is Blotmonad. Blood month. For the sacrifices, for the slaughter.

I won’t slit the throats of goats out of gratitude for the harvest, or to gain favor from the gods. Instead, I’ll take notice of leaves the color of beef. Here in late November, below the silverskin sky, the trees aren’t wholly bare but getting there. Who knows which breeze will loosen the last leaves for good? Which breeze will drop them without sound onto the surface of a pond, or there on the sidewalk for us to trushle through? Jun Fujita, in a tanka poem called “November” captures the moment of this late stage of the month:

On a pale sandhill
A bare tree stands;
The death-wind
Has snatched the last few leaves.

The death-wind does its snatching in November, and the leaves and berries that remain are both defiant and vulnerable. They are no longer protected by the verdant gown of summer or peak autumn’s showy golden eruption. They seem to say, Take me, wind. Wet me, rain. Soak me up and down. Hold me, cold. Grip me. I am exposed. Bare boned. And I sense the coming snow. One sees the bare and witchy trees against the sky and a hunger arises. It comes from a residual, deep in, leftover place inside of us, from a time when winter was long and cold was dangerous, when you couldn’t have strawberries on your cereal in January. The hunger says, Time is short and getting shorter. And the hunger exists in the guts, and it says eat, and it exists lower, and it says fuck. A heightened hunger in November, for the roasted, simmered things, and also for the heated press of flesh. There’s an energy behind the eyes only present this time of year. So much heat, and so much quiet. Here we face the end of the year, and all the eventual, inevitable ends, and all we can do, all I am ever trying to do, is make friends with time. In November, we feel the hand of death closer at our backs. “Since the day of my birth,” writes Jean Cocteau, “my death began its walk. It is walking towards me without hurrying.”

The planked path ended at a small pond, black and still. No fish rippled the surface, no turtles sunned themselves on logs, no herons stood on stalk legs. We stood at the edge of the planks and looked. And then he who knew about plants lowered himself and leaned to the side of the path. “Look,” he said. “Pitcher plants.” I knelt and looked. It felt like a prize, a treasure unearthed. A cluster of them dangled above some moss. I’d never seen them in the world before. I inhaled so fast it might’ve been a gasp. The shape was one to enter and be entered by. An opening at the top was lipped all around and it led into a conical hollow that curled just so at the end, scabbard and sword at once. Rising from the top was a flayed bit, fanned like a cobra head, a peacock tail, showy and inviting. I pulled a piece of long grass and rubbed it around the opening ring, and then lower in, entering the pitcher part, as though I expected there’d be muscle movement in response, some clench or swell, some chlorophylled flinch and throb. Then I felt shy. But we’d come to a quiet place, and modesty no longer applied.

I was kneeling still when we heard footsteps on the planks, unhurried, a vibration through the wood like a distant train. I felt as if we’d been found, caught up to, that our time—too short!—was up. Around the corner, ducking under a low passage of bramble, a woman appeared, past her middle age. Her hair was white and she wore more clothes than the weather demanded. We all exchanged hellos and she walked to the edge of the planks and stood looking at the pond. She turned. “You have to see this,” she said, palming her phone in our direction.

On the screen, a photograph of the very spot we stood, at the end of the path, except there it was in winter, a landscape altogether iced, the pond glowing a blue-white, the reeds coated and brittle, everything cold, blue-white, and glittering. “Beautiful,” I said, and I meant it. But it was off-putting as well. She was showing us a picture of the past, and she was showing us a picture of the future, too. All at once, we were moved backward and forward in time. This place, its soft moss, its pliant pitcher plants, all the rich wetness all around, would get colder and slow (it had already started happening) and everything would close, dry, hardened and statued in its annual chamber of ice.

We aren’t there yet, I wanted to say. We have a little bit more time. That’s what November makes us know. We have a little bit more time. It’s one of the last days of the month, and the clouds have come and so the rain will come and then the snow will come. The Buddhists and bards and heavy-metal balladeers know: nothing lasts forever. Another season’s closing song. Death has been walking toward us all along, but in November we hear the footsteps.

We hear the footsteps in the glow of the leaves that cling and the bone branches silhouetted against the sky. A euphoria comes from the reminder of our aliveness. Footsteps, quiet, steady, and the breeze—that one—the cold breath from the world lifting the last leaf from the branch, no matter how hard it clings. It will undo the leaf’s grip, detach it from its source, settle it on the earth, return it to its source. And that same cold breath will detach us, return us. So, a sweater. A walk. The heated press of someone else’s thigh. The smell of sweet mulching leaves. Milkweed silk like moonlight. Listen. Quiet. Listen. Footfalls in steady rhythm in the air, the constant beat, unlimping: no vem ber no vem ber no vem ber no vem no vem no vem

Nina MacLaughlin is a writer and carpenter in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read earlier installments of Novemberance here.

Jennie Brownscombe, The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, 1914.

The field where I played soccer before I had breasts was called Metacomet Park. A nylon net full of balls would be spilled on the field for drills, and we ate orange wedges at halftime. Metacomet, known otherwise as Metacom or King Philip, was a Wampanoag chief, and in 1676, fifty-six years after the Pilgrims dropped anchor in Plymouth, he was assassinated in a swamp. The Puritans dismembered him, tore apart his limbs, hung his body parts in trees. The man who shot him got his hand as a trophy. For over twenty years, his head was displayed on a stake in Plymouth.

Around the time that I played soccer at Metacomet, I also took walks with my mother in the fields near our house. Now those fields are no longer fields; they’re a subdivision where houses rise out of the land like crops, lined and alike, and the driveways arc at the same angles and the cars in the driveways are large and the bushes are tidy and round and all is neat and safe and lobotomizing. When my mother and I walked in the fields, no road or roof in sight, I thought about arriving on a land with no houses, with no streets or sockets or sinks, with no supermarkets to buy Fruit Roll-Ups or grapes. I imagined myself stepping onto the sand, seeing trees and high grass at sway in the wind. Now what? You’d have to be brave, I thought, facing that space. How do you just create a whole new world? I learned later that wasn’t the right question. A world had already been created in that place. How do you steal a world? How do you destroy it? How do you rewrite the story so it sounds so uncomplicated? 

In a story about Metacomet, Washington Irving writes: “Society is like a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface; he, however, who would study nature in its wildness and variety, must plunge into the forest, must explore the glen, must stem the torrent, and dare the precipice.”

All this pruning, smoothing, and de-wilding; all this denial of mess and tangle; all this false comfort found on the surface of things. In my family, we don’t make much eye contact with each other. Rarely do we hug. We laugh hard and tell the same stories and like being around each other, but we do not look each other in the eye. I have wondered about this. Growing up, I felt bewildered at other people’s houses, seeing my friends embraced by their parents, their heads petted, their faces kissed. How strange, I thought. When we gather now, we laugh and the feeling is mostly of ease and well-being but discomfort, too, because who is more frustrating and devastating than the members of your family? The comfort and discomfort of brothers and sisters and parents, of knowing each other so deeply and so well, in ways we don’t ever know other people, and also not knowing each other at all. There’s a distance there, born of embarrassment. It’s the embarrassment of intimacy, of this shared blood chugging in the veins, and the embarrassment of mortality, You will be gone, and you will be gone, and I will be gone, and I cannot know that and meet your eyes right now.

Gaston Bachelard ranks intimacy as the ultimate aim, our highest value. Mark Doty, in his slim book Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, grapples with the view:

I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral courage, or heroism, or altruistic acts, or work in the cause of social change? What about wealth or accomplishment? And yet something about it rings true, finally—that what we want is to be brought into relation, to be inside, within. Perhaps it’s true that nothing matters more to us than that.

Bachelard writes of the memory of first homes, of being within our original nests: “If we return to the old home as to a nest, it is because memories are dreams, because the home of other days has become a great image of lost intimacy.” How do we create, or re-create, that feeling of quiet and sanctuary, of being enclosed, enwombed, and held? And how do we balance that with a need for movement, independence, thrill, and elsewhere? Doty writes of the dueling impulses between home and away, the need “for the deep solid place of roots and belonging” and “the desire for travel and motion, for the single separate spark of the self fiercely moving forward, out into time, into the great absorbing stream of the world.”

That great absorbing stream is exactly where Ishmael aims himself when it’s a damp, drizzly November in his soul. When he turns grim about the mouth, he takes to the sea where “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open.” Away from home, rootless, wild, one can ask the simpler questions. One can find out what one misses and find out what one needs. Getting out is also another way of looking in.

It’s no coincidence that Melville raises Narcissus in those opening paragraphs of Moby Dick, Narcissus who gazes at his rippling reflection and cannot grasp “the tormenting, mild image” and so plunges in and drowns. Every water surface, velvet smooth, offers up that tormenting image, with the “ungraspable phantom of life” below it. Lean over. Look. What’s there? What’s on the other side of that smooth surface? Fathomless depths, total dark, the great yawn, the shadow, the gape, the frightening mess that’s easier to avoid. Look and look. The surface is penetrable, just slip on through, but you don’t come out, or maybe you just don’t come out the same.

Maybe it’s why we have a hard time holding each other’s eyes in my family: to look too long is to risk that plunge, to see ourselves reflected back and see what’s there beyond. We face ourselves, we face the history inherited to us, and we rush backward in time to an original nest, to an open field, to a source we only rarely get to touch.

In that aching intimacy between the ones who share blood, the ungraspable phantom lives behind their eyes. “I love to sail forbidden seas,” claims Ishmael, “and land on barbarous coasts.” That’s what’s there to be found when one veers toward the darker, less hospitable pockets of our minds and selves. “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote,” says Ishmael. We run, and we return.

In a letter from 1865, Emily Dickinson, who never left New England, writes, “It is also November. The noons are more laconic and the sundowns sterner …  —is still with the sister who put her child in an ice nest last Monday forenoon … I notice where Death has been introduced, he frequently calls, making it desirable to forestall his advances.” And she goes on to write of the death of the maid of the family. “I winced at her loss, because I was in the habit of her.” Being in the habit of someone is a good way to describe love. What is love if not a habit? An acquired behavior pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary—a deepest sort of intimacy—and a tendency or practice that’s especially hard to give up. And even more, to inhabit. I am in the habit of you. I inhabit you. I exist within.

And maybe, like Doty says, nothing matters more. But it can be a hard place to be. So we take to sea, hurl ourselves into the world. But those remote and barbarous coasts are close by, too, right across the table, and there to be found as you lock eyes for a moment passing a plate that’s full and warm. We leave home and return to it. We re-create approximations of it from memory or imagination. We learn and then learn more. The way I was taught, Thanksgiving was all so simple and so lovely in its aims—food and gratitude, a feast to celebrate the bounty of the harvest. It wasn’t until much later that I learned how much more complicated it is, and the part we play in that history. It’s hard to look and necessary to look, to know ourselves and know the world, to know that a thieving took place, and a smoothing of the surface of the story. Look, and look harder, to better reckon with who we are and what we come from, and to mourn what’s been taken by violence or time.

During these feast days, dare the precipice. Look out and in, deep as you can. As you gather around a table to celebrate the bounty of the harvest, let things be messy and strange and complicated. How strange it is, to exist within, to belong, and how alienating, to be inside and outside at the same time, part of something and separate. How painful, how lucky, all this blood and love. A plate passed across space, a laugh, an easy or uneasy acknowledgment: here we are. For now, here we all are. And that is plenty.

Nina MacLaughlin is a writer and carpenter in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read earlier installments of Novemberance here.

Anselm Kiefer, Nigredo, 1984, oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, and straw on photograph and woodcut, mounted on canvas.

Three uncarved pumpkins the size of candlepin bowling balls stud the mulch in the front garden of a neighbor’s house on the short street where I live. City creatures—squirrels, raccoons, rats—have chewed coin-size circles through the tough outer rind and into the stringy pale flesh below. These sections of gnaw are now ringed with black. The black of rot, a black that looks at once dusty, as though charred by the flame of time, and slick, like the vegetal squelch of something long forgotten in a drawer of the fridge. It is a definitive black, the black of something making slow return to a different state.

Along the river, the milkweed pods have split and pour forth their seeded snow-white silk. I walk south along the river when the sun is in the final stages of its work, and scramble down the banks to look. Off tall stalks, desiccated pods spill a thrilling and climactic white. White like rabbit fur, like pearl, white that holds rainbows when the light hits right.

The leaves of the young gingko trees that grow out of the sidewalk fell all at once. A few days ago, the fan-shaped leaves with their crenulated margins glowed gold from the branches and fluttered with nonchalance. The following morning, I gasped to see it: branches all but bare and the trees seemed to grow out of puddles of gold.

At the cemetery nearby, a twisting Japanese maple is aflame, its feathery leaves a deep red, a bodily red, a red that blazes between wine and blood. Those leaves will grip the branches much deeper into the month than most of the trees around it, almost tauntingly, in a flare of lingering crimson.

These are the colors of November in the neighborhood.

The German artist Anselm Kiefer knew something of the November palette. In 1984, he painted a massive, barren field. Nubs of crops rise from ashy earth and retreat in boney rows into a pale horizon. The painting stretches more than eighteen feet across and nearly eleven feet high, and as you approach it, you can almost hear the crunch of dried stalk stubs beneath your feet and smell the smoke and coming snow. In the upper left corner of the canvas, against a small swell of gold, Kiefer wrote the word “Nigredo.”

In alchemy, nigredo is the first of four stages in the process of transformation, defined by the blackness of putrefaction and char. The following three stages—albedo, citrinitas, and rubedo—are likewise associated with color: white and gold and red. In analytic psychology, nigredo is the stage where one descends into the chaos and darkness of the unconscious and encounters; in Jungian terms, the shadow. Kiefer’s field is forbidding, grim, but it is no wasteland. With that one word he makes us know that the November crunch of dead earth below the feet holds the promise of rebirth, of coming out the other side of the dark.

Pieter Bruegel, The Return of the Herd, 1565, oil on panel.

A black cloud approaches from the east over a craggy river-valley landscape in Bruegel the Elder’s 1565 depiction of November in Return of the Herd, one of a series of paintings he did depicting the months. The palette is all ochres, golds, and grays. Bruegel was a painter of ruddy-faced merriment and mischief, of soup bowls and warm loaves and codpieces in taverns and towns, as well as Boschian hellscapes. Here he depicts six men driving cattle down a path, away from the pasture and back to the barn, the dark cloud at their backs, winter on its way. But there’s no fear here. The dark is coming, chaos will descend, and man and animal move together without haste in the face of it, knowing what approaches and knowing what needs to be done. In Bruegel’s November, all feels orderly and a steady rumble of thudding hooves quilts the afternoon. The group heads toward protection and warmth, a roof, a hearth. Don’t be afraid: it’s there to be found.

This is not a confrontation with the sublime, no approach to the abyss, the ceaseless and non-understandable, and the swooping sense of awe and doom it brings. Bruegel shows instead the natural and human world in sync and a darkness that is, for now, kept at bay. We know, though, that the darkness comes, and the vast unpeopled places terrify. An experiment in 2005 asked forty-eight university students to look at images of wild nature—let’s say pounding seas and jagged cliffs and wide canyons—as well as images of “managed nature”—let’s say a park with pruned paths and manicured bushes, with flowerbeds of tulips and pansies. The students were then asked to rate how beautiful they found these scenes. Prior to looking at the images, the researchers reminded the members of one group that someday they would die.

What they found: Those who had death whispered in their ear showed less preference for the scenes of wild nature. Once death has been inserted into the mind, the magnificence of the mountain range registers in a different way, and what’s sensed instead is its gaping indifference, the nothingness of one’s flicker of existence in comparison. Managed nature gives not only the illusion of control, the comfort of our efforts to contain and command the life and growth of things, but also, I think, reveals the evidence of another human hand. In the tulip rows, the pathway fenced and mowed, we see the evidence of tools and work. Not only is there control to be had, but also, the managed landscape says, you are not alone.

We’re not so far from a wilder state, a solitude at the gate of forces much older and much more powerful than us. Rules and laws and designated labors can only explain so much or offer so much order. The anthropologist Loren Eiseley knew it. He writes of a night drive down a mountain, of seeing in the woods beside the road a creature loping along, shapeshifting between the trees. He understands it as a dog, but it devolves from there into “a running weave of colors and faces into which it would lapse once more as it bounded silently into the inhuman unpopulated wood.” Eiseley shines his headlights into the forest—a stand-in for the probing gaze of science, of humankind’s search for answers—but he is met with mostly dark. In the end, moving through the woods is a flickering shape, a mystery, maybe dog and maybe not a dog at all. You don’t have to veer too far off the path, the paved road, the highway for words like dog not to matter, or even make sense.

Limbourg Brothers, Tres riches heures du Duc de Berry, 1413, illuminated manuscript.

In the wilderness, and at this moment in the year, boundaries between world and otherworld get a little thinner. One can lose one’s way. Labor is one way to forestall the fear, to enter the darkness ready. Bruegel’s calendar paintings follow a medieval tradition of depicting the labors of the months, the most recognizable set being those from the Très riches heures du Duc de Berry, a Book of Hours painted in the early fifteenth century by the brothers Limbourg. Each folio features the tasks and acts linked with the month—people chop wood, shear sheep, sow fields, till, harvest, hunt—underneath a lapis sky illustrating the corresponding sign of the zodiac. November’s labor here, and across many such versions, shows a peasant, thick, wearing a tunic, banging on oak trees to knock down acorns to fatten pigs for slaughter.

I am no farmer. I do not keep bees or sheep. Maybe like you, right now, at your screen, I am mostly removed from the rhythms of the year. I know the days are short and getting colder. I watch the rot, the milkweed, the gingko leaves, the maple, but I won’t bang oak trees to make acorns rain. What is our labor in November now? One job: Pay attention. Pay attention. Pay attention. And every year emerge altered, ready, like lead to gold.

Nina MacLaughlin is a writer and carpenter in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read earlier installments of Novemberance.

Godfried Schalcken, Young Girl with a Candle (detail), 1670–1675.

“I’m in the November of my life,” said Francesca, a fifty-eight-year-old curator with good shoulders and dark lively eyes and dark wavy hair and a laugh that came from deep in her gut. Two years ago, she was told she had two-and-a-half years to live. “This was my relationship with death before,” she said, holding her arms apart at full wingspan. “Knew it would happen. Never thought about it.” Then she brought her index fingers together so they touched in front of her chest. “This was the diagnosis.” Death was on top of her. The stamp of an expiration date on her forehead annihilated all other thought. In time, and with titanic mental effort, the initial all-consuming horror gave way. “In November, you’re winding down,” she said. “It means incorporating less sharp edges, more smoke.”

Which is maybe to say more mystery, more potential. The sharp edges of fact give way to the blur of the question mark, the uncertainty, the quiet. “The space of nothingness is where one finds his or her own self and life’s richness,” writes the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. “This is a wonderful time of my life,” Francesca said.

Francesca talked of her career as a curator, and the importance of “the space of nothingness,” how the gap between the works of art was as important to her as the works themselves. “Every inch mattered,” she said. She spoke of the sweet spot, a placement wherein two objects are in tension, in conversation, put at a distance that allows one to see the most of both at once. “There’s a perfect distance where empty space allows both to be alive in a different way,” she said. “Do you know the Japanese concept of ma?”

Ma loosely translates to negative space, to emptiness, vacancy, blankness. It is a pause, in time, space, music, conversation. “Ma makes nothingness palpable and tangible,” writes Ando. It’s a space ripe with an atmosphere of uncertainty, suspension, and possibility. The Japanese character consists of the graphic for door and for moon, suggesting “a door through the crevice of which the moonshine peeps in,” as the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren defines it in his Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese. Ma is the crack that lets the light in.

In his slim book In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki writes of seeing light in darkness. He writes of a large room lit by candles and tries to describe the color of that particular sort of darkness. He calls it “a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow.” The particles collect in a way that’s all potential, into a

“visible darkness,” where always something seemed to be flickering and shimmering, a darkness that on occasion held greater terrors than darkness out of doors. This was the darkness in which ghosts and monsters were active.

That quality doesn’t exist in small rooms lit by bulbs turned on with a flick of a switch. Tanizaki laments the extinction of a darkness that helps the mind see ghosts, that edges one up against the vast, the frightening, the nonunderstandable. The candlelight makes one better know the dark, the shadows, the spaces unseen. And the dark—the hollows and corners behind the curtains, above the rafters, the places where dimness pools—helps one better know the light.

Likewise, ma makes one aware of the presence of absence. It’s the gap where the moonlight sifts through; it’s the space between two slate stones that guide your steps along a path; it’s the hollow where ghosts gather; it’s the pause in conversation, the ripe silence of the unspoken.

Jeanette Winterson writes of the relationship between light and conversation:

I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing—their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling—their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less. There are longer pauses.

Certain kinds of dark allow us to be more at home with silence. An upped intimacy results. Night grows in November. It gets dark in November. We can quiet down in November. In the long evenings, embrace the pause, the fertile quiet. From the first of the month to the thirtieth, in a small city in the northeast, night extends by fifty-nine minutes. It’s not the month that loses the most light though. September and October get darker by far, each losing about eighty-three minutes of light. Even August, when the fireflies throb by the bushes at the edge of the yard and you still don’t need sleeves or shoes, loses more light than November by more than fifteen minutes. But the dark feels different in November.

That’s in large part due to daylight saving time. On Sunday, unless you live in Arizona, you bumped back the clocks, which means an hour of light that belonged to the evening now belongs to the morning. For many, that hour-earlier sunset is an abrupt reminder that winter is on top of us, that time is only ever running out. For those who prefer the lengthened twilights of summer, the afternoon dark carries with it a sense of gloom, a lethargy, a melancholy, a despair. At two in the morning on a Sunday in November, the slow creep of shifting minutes of light across the year accelerates all at once.

There’s a power to it: it’s the one day a year you can pick an hour to relive. Turning the clock back an hour sounds like a shoe dropped on a rug, a thud, abrupt, echoless, and then back to silence. It sounds like a candle being blown out, that quick canvas thwap of flame extinguished off a wick. The smoke rises in silence, the flame’s ghost on its way elsewhere, and suddenly, sooner than you think, it gets dark.

November holds the in-between. Between warmth and cold, between light and dark, between living and dying. The eleventh month, getting darker, getting colder, echoes our own eventual winding down and gives chance to live in the richest, deepest way. “The space of nothingness is where one struggles to reach a deeper layer of self,” writes Ando. November opens a path to those deeper layers unavailable to us during the rest of the year. It’s an approximation of the expiration date stamped on our foreheads.

“When death is right here,” said Francesca, her index fingers held up together, side by side and touching, “it eliminates everything else.” She kept her fingers pressed together. “When you are thinking too much about death, you are not experiencing the ma.”

She spread her arms wide again. “And when it’s right here,” she said, fingers apart again at full wingspan, “when you’re not thinking at all about death, you are also not experiencing the ma, and you take everything for granted.”

She moved her fingers back together, keeping them four and a half inches apart. “Here, though. Here,” she said, and paused, and quiet filled the room.

Nina MacLaughlin is a writer and carpenter in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read earlier installments of Novemberance here.

All Saints’ Day in Stockholm

November is a hinge in the year, and the door gets opened to ghosts.

It was a late fall weekend some years ago and lunch had gone long. A Spanish tortilla sat in the center of the table like a golden sun eclipsed as slices were put onto plates. A fire, lit that morning, threw heat from the other room. There was wine, maybe more than usual. Conversation rolled. After the meal, by the fire, the sun well into its descent, time moved at a different pace, a slower throb in the cheek-warmed flush from the wine, in the dimming light and hearth-warmed room. The fire glowed and spit, released its quiet hiss, and made that quieter high hum: the sound of the tree not in pain but in shift from one state to another.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked the man who stood by the fire. He came from the rainy, witchy gloom of Galicia in northwest Spain, a place in climate and culture closer to the bagpipe-y mists of the British Isles than to, say, the thumping island atmosphere of Ibiza. He was narrow framed, wiry, with a coiled sort of energy, and gray-black hair in his rich, thick mustache. He had heat behind his eyes and there are few people I’d rather have a conversation with. He was somewhere over seventy, though his blazing vitality belied it.

He poked at the fire and the sparks wept down into the embers and ash. He spoke of an old stone farmhouse in Spain, of the chestnut trees there, of the cows who lived in the barn space under the house. He told me someone old had died, a great-uncle, and his body had been laid out in a small bedroom upstairs above the kitchen. People came and climbed the stairs and visited his body and the only light in the room came from candles that shifted in the farmhouse draft, flinging shadows on the wall, rising and slipping. He was a child then and he climbed the stairs with his cousins and they giggled because they were scared. He got to the door of the bedroom and the light was dim and the shadows slinked and all he saw was a mound on the bed and he ran down the hall. A hand followed him, reaching out from that room, trailing him down the hall, steady and slow. He felt the hand that day, and he felt that hand for all the days afterward.

In Spain, November 1 is Día de Todos los Santos, All Saints’ Day, a day to honor those in your life who have died, and chestnuts get roasted on fires. They smell like biscuits, buttered and honeyed, and they put up less resistance against the teeth than a normal nut. Not the woody chomp of an almond but closer to potato, a starchy softness, like tiny loaves of arboreal bread. Out of their shells, they look like miniature cream-colored brains.

In Spain, and across many Catholic countries and cultures, it’s believed the souls of the dead return on the first days of November. People visit the graves of those they love and leave flowers and food on tables and graves, as invitation and offering, as a welcoming back, as a way of saying we remember you, in private hope that when they meet the same inescapable fate, they’ll be remembered, too.

A friend and I had a walk in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge on one of the first real cold days last fall. I asked him also: Do you believe in ghosts?

“I believe in human forgetting,” he said.

I think he meant that he believes people can disappear in more ways than one. The Spanish author Julio Llamazares makes a case for memory in his elegiac novel The Yellow Rain:

Sometimes you think you have forgotten everything, that the rust and dust of the years have destroyed all the things we once entrusted to their voracious appetite. But all it takes is a noise, a smell, a sudden unexpected touch, and suddenly all the alluvium of time sweeps pitilessly over us, and our memories light up with all the brilliance and fury of a lightening flash.

Llamazares writes of a man living alone in an abandoned village in the Spanish Pyrenees. Around his waist, he wears the rope his wife used to hang herself, and he recalls how life used to be. He watches leaves fall and how nature overtakes the crumbling town. He digs his grave and is visited by ghosts. It is a novel of unalloyed melancholy, a lyrical and atmospheric examination of solitude, time, and ends. It is, perhaps, the most Novembery book I know: for its blurring of world and otherworld, for its grapple with time and loss, for its timing of autumn’s descent into winter, and for the presence of ghosts that feel as real and as natural as the yellow leaves falling from the poplar trees.

On November 1, souls are on the move. For a few days at the start of the month, those gone drift among us. The air is crowded with them. “Soul, we saw, said we / saw,” writes Nathaniel Mackey in his poem “Day After Day of the Dead.” “No one wanted to / know / what soul was.” Maybe you feel it. Maybe you sense a different vibration in the air as you rustle through gold-red leaves on the sidewalk in the four thirty dim. In November, something gets stoked.

In Spain, people gather around fires, like the templeless Celts who gathered in forests and fields. They roast and peel the chestnuts, leap over the flames, dust dark ash on their cheeks. They eat sausage and drink young wine. The Celts saw October 31, or Samhain, as “the first night of a year measured in nights.” November 1 is another sort of new year’s day. Happy new year.

Happy Día de los Muertos. In Mexico, marigold petals make the graves glow. They lead the way to ofrendas, to altars honoring the dead, and the festival lasts three days as the boundary between living and dead, world and otherworld, dissolves. In The Labyrinth of Solitude, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz writes of the fiesta:

Everything is united: good and evil, day and night, the sacred and the profane. Everything merges, loses shape and individuality and returns to the primordial mass. The fiesta is a cosmic experiment, an experiment in disorder, reuniting contradictory elements and principles in order to bring about a renascence of life.

The impulse behind it, Paz suggests, is more than amusement, more than an urge to return to an original state of mayhem and come out reborn. The celebration is a means to escape ourselves, “to leap over the wall of solitude that confines [us] during the rest of the year.”

Feeling death’s hand behind you is one sort of company, one way of knowing you are not alone in time, and it is not the same as knowing a ghost. “I believe in ghosts,” said the man by the fire from Spain. “But not in the way of dead souls wandering around haunting anyone.” Instead, he explained, the still-living become ghosts, the people he knew who slipped away, who changed to the point of being unrecognizable. He talked of friends, his brother, who, as the result of marriage, kids, time, shifted into forms he no longer recognized, or no longer wanted to. Death “makes absence just another familiar habit,” writes Llamazares. “Disappearance, however, has no limits.” For the man from Spain, the disappeared were preserved in the shapes they had when they were full of fire; now they were ghosts, existing in his mind as memory, in his life as gonenesses, recollections as opposed to flesh, another “invisible imprint,” as Mackey describes soul in his poem. Perhaps turning these people into ghosts came from his fear of seeing the same in himself, of wanting to preserve his own fire and youth, undiminished. To all my senses, it had worked; he had. We hadn’t turned the lights on, and the room had darkened around us except for the gold-red glow from the fire. We’d been held in the warm open hand of the fire and the lasting glow of the wine. And all at once he seemed to grow self-conscious. He disappeared down the hall, and I was left with the fire, left to consider my own ghosts, those in death, those in other states of absence, and all of us in the midst of a shift from one state to another.

It’s November now and there’s something different afoot. In November, when the nights get long and the days get cold, as we approach the long dark that is winter, we feel that hand following us down the hall. We feel death’s presence and are therefore more alert to our own. November makes us know, at the edges of our mind, that for each of us, looming winter will one day stretch into eternal darkness. So we welcome the dead among us, remember them, invite them back, and we eat and drink and let the boundaries dissolve, and we are more certain that we’re alive. That’s what’s on offer in November. It makes us know, at the edges of our mind, that we still cast shadows, that we are still bones and blood, that for now, for now, our heft is still heated. Feel it?

Nina MacLaughlin is a writer and carpenter in Cambridge, Massachusetts.