Since the year 2003 when we moved into our present house, I have planted tons of zinnias on a horizontal berm across the front of our yard. I drive the local garden shops crazy in the spring buying up every Orange Profusion Zinnia I can get my hands on, a purchase that pays great dividends now as fall ochres and tans take the upper hand and chilly weather rolls in.
I don’t like putting my garden to rest – not at all. It’s not the work involved that gets to me but knowing that I will need to lean into the faith that it’ll all come right back up in the Spring, and that takes some mental acrobatics on my part. I hold onto the quote that we are to plant with tears but harvest with joy, meaning for me that my little slice of the earth will soon be taking a needed rest.
I can tell you within a day or two when the first frost will hit, a time my Zinnias say goodbye and turn to spongy, drooping globes. Even though I hear evidence that our weather patterns are making drastic changes, and that our coastlines are liquifying into the sea, I can tell you without hesitation that our first frost will be within a day either side of Halloween. Every year, like clockwork, with a deviance of less than .02378 minus pi over nineteen, the bewitching phenomena of the beautiful burnt orange palette of Zinnias outside my front porch will inhale the seven o’clock rising sun one last time, gasp through a shiny layer of frost on their petals, fall over on each other as a mushy brown casserole.
That visual really describes more about how I feel on the inside when colors fade around the garden. When I was a child and feeling sickly, I would ask my mom to check my “tempchur,” pronounced as one syllable. Here at our doorstep, there is no thermometer needed. The frost will be there come Halloween, maybe not a hard frost, but a frost nonetheless and the death of my zinnias will set the mood for all the little minions dressed up as Despicable Me’s or Me-mes who come tripping up our walkway weighted down with candy sacks bigger than Felonious Gru.
It's not the dead zinnias that will scare them however, but the shifting alliances daylight has with early evening shadows that grow longer and thinner as the winter solstice nears. Our circadian rhythms are shifting too, seemingly flowing backwards inside our bodies like some kind of sap from a tree. Down, down, down they go until our endocrine system asks the rest of our pieces-parts what is going on. Recalling that 1930’s fighter of evil, “only the Shadow knows,” who outwits spirits searching in vain for their earthly home, and inevitably are sent back to their hellish infernos.
If all that sound spooky, imagine you are a Trick or Treater walking up a driveway to a ranch style house. It’s 1966 and you are dressed in your Lone Ranger outfit, ready to scream “Hi-O Silver, Away!” when your dear neighbors, the Benders, open their door to greet you…
You are seven years old and barely able to see into their small foyer, and although you thought you had heard strange sounds out on the street as you turned to go up their driveway, long haunted chords coming from a cathedral organ hit you full-on as the door swings slowly open. But no one opened the door. The eerie fullness of atonal chords fills the darkness within, as if coming from a funeral high on a hill. These are not chords from a song but chords that are being held down longer than they should be, echoing through the walls of some forgotten mansion They sweep through the screen door, parting your bangs ever so slightly as if on a breeze and push silently past you like a Spector.
But there is no breeze. The night outside is moonless, still. It’s only you and your friend because it is 1966. Your parents stayed at home. Mom is wrapping up dinner, and dad has settled into his favorite armchair to watch Walter Cronkite and the nightly news. And now, you are wishing you’d stayed at home…
“Mom, Dad, Stan is here. We’re leaving to go now! Bye!”
“Bye!” they yell back, not looking up, and then Dad adds, “Don’t cut through the Standring’s yard, he’ll come after you with a rake! Oh, Good Lord! I’ll have to answer to that in the morning!” Mom is calling to you too, reminding you to say thank-you when they put candy in your sack.
It doesn’t matter. Their instructions are lost on the slamming door. You and Stan are long gone, racing away to fill your plastic pumpkin lanterns. Hi-O Silver Away! There were shortcuts to be had and treats to be harvested from as many neighbors as possible. The first stop, past the zinnias and up through the corridor of a dark carport, was the Bender’s front door, a stop where candy was given out by the bucket full, and jawbreakers that last almost a week.
And just as you reach for the door, it opens with a sickening screech, slowly as if it might come unhinged. You step back when no one appears to greet you. How did that door open? One candle wildly flickers in a corner and the outline of a figure comes into focus. There, sitting high upon the organ bench is the silhouetted figure of Gary, the oldest Bender son, cloaked in black, bent over, his fingers held down to the keys.
But you don’t know that hunchbacked figure. You are overcome by the penetrating and discordant notes that shut down your other senses. You strain against the night that smells of old cat hair and acrid, molding leaves piles in the corner of the porch, the smell of those who never sleep in the underworld. It is Fright you see and Dread you hear, urging you to turn and flee, but you have succumbed to their hypnotic effect and cannot budge.
No one has come to the door, and you take a quick glance towards your buddy Stan for some kind of reassurance. Is this really happening? But Stan has disappeared. You feel your chest beating through your mail order Lone Ranger cowboy shirt with the shiny, albacore buttons. You begin to utter “Trick or…” but every other part of you says RUN! RUN FOR IT! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!
In the background you are aware of a low and deepening moan, like a chain dragging up the basement stairs, as the face of the figure, a vampire, slowly turns to stare at you. The candlelight catches a glint off his sharpened teeth, his grin widening with the resonance of the pipe organ. It is my brother, staring at you. And that moan you heard? It has now swelled into a contemptuous laugh stored up from centuries of being forced to rake leaves in the fall. The vampire, my brother, is playing the only organ note he knows after nine years of private lessons, one frosty note from his perch of death, the Bender’s haunted foyer.
And you, the tiny waif who thought everyone would swoon over your cuteness and clever costumed despicableness, who thought your coffers of candy would be full by midnight, can only stand there, frozen stiff as a pine board, and stare back at the Transylvanian performer, the organ Meister. It is Cold Himself delivering a deathly laugh from his frosty fortress and holding down a dissonant chord long enough to terrify every trickster that chanced upon this moonless night and scare off every single zinnia that was still holding on for dear life, just beyond the porch.