The Cold Grue

I'd first read the term cold grue in the story Thrawn Janet by Robert Louis Stevenson. It was an arcane term to me, but I knew what it meant the moment I read it. I'd known that feeling since I was a child. It usually arrived in November, when it arrived at all, and lay mostly under the surface of winter, waiting to loom up at certain vulnerable moments - something that seemed almost sentient, a grey existential chill that was not merely cold, but deathly.

The appearance of the cold grue was something I'd come to dread. A rising uneasiness, the sense of something minatory, searching along the ground with the wind. I'd felt it a few notable times in my childhood - the visit to Liberty Hill, a playful seance gone awry that my cousins and I held on Thanksgiving, 1980, and the time surrounding the violent death of my aunt not too long afterward. Every holiday season since has been an exercise in keeping it at bay. 

Having spent my much of my life in Texas, it was something I'd associated with my home state, something that lived in the winter landscape there, so I did not expect to find it the first time I visited northwest Ohio in 2022. But on the second-to-last day of my trip, there it was, drifting toward me in waves as I stood on the steps at the art museum, as ominous and melancholy and as pure in form as I'd ever felt it. 

 

I'd never expected my path in life to lead me to the Midwest, and certainly not to such an unadulterated version of the feeling I'd been hiding from. Perhaps it was just my mood that day, I'd thought. Maybe it was just that I was standing in a sculpture garden. As I'd written in one of those links above, the surreal nature of modern art always did leave me a bit uneasy. Or perhaps it was just a temporary, momentary effect of the weather. 

When I did move here in 2023, it was summer, and there were only the aquarium blue sky and cornfields and the sound of daylight crickets in evidence. The cold grue was far from my mind. I would walk through the swamp preserve in the afternoon, or the marshy edgelands next to the mall, studying wildflowers and cottonwood trees. We visited Lake Erie. Then autumn arrived. 

The grue did not come right away. Gradually, though quicker than I would have imagined, the landscape changed its character. There is no real autumn where I'm from, so to watch it take on color and atmosphere was fascinating. Did you know that leaves will simply fall off of trees, without being blown down by wind after drying up from drought? I didn't, so just to watch them was like standing in fairyland. I was very lonely at the time, but it was beautiful even so. I spent so many evenings out there, learning about my newly adopted home, trying to take my mind off the rest of my life, which had quickly commenced unravelling. I learned about being cold, putting on more and more sweaters every time I went out. The skies became greyer and heavier, the chill wind fluttering the remaining cottonwood leaves. 

Near the center of the swamp preserve is a forest of skinny black ash trees. In summer, they were green, humming with insects, but no sooner had November come the skinny forest had transformed into a leafless, slightly hallucinatory labyrinth. The effect being a bit like a hall of mirrors, if only to reflect the inner self. I always felt uneasy when passing by, but as the fall closed in and the temperature fell, I found myself drawn to the place. There was something familiar down among the ashes, something ominous and melancholy and cold. I was so lonely, so heavy-hearted. The reason I'd moved here had fallen apart. I was unwelcome and unwanted, my future in serious doubt. The cold grue beckoned with frigid fingers down this forlorn path. It came over me with such intensity that day that I realized I was in the center of it, as if it had all come down to this singular point in time. I sat down and spoke to it. 

"What are you?' I said.

"The process of dying" it replied.

"Why are you here?"

"It's the earth's dying season"

"Why have I felt you in so many circumstances, then?"

"Because all deaths are the same to the dead." 

My phone rang. I gathered my things and stood up to walk home, wondering if was still existing in my world at all. 

I've moved on since that day, slowly piecing my life back together, trying to find any remnants of my lost inner light. The cold grue remains, in the autumn wind, in the snow, in the garden that has gone to seed. I'm not so troubled by it anymore, even if I am still haunted. I live in a place with all four seasons now, and have a lot still to learn about spring. 

The Wind Carries the Witches

Blowing the last few leaves from the skeletal trees. 

[Title courtesy of Christian Bauman]

The Edge Of Autumn

Just days before the equinox and blazing hot. Autumn merely a celestial notion.

I'd been expecting a package and news had reached my ears that it had been delivered that very afternoon. Fantastic. With hope in my heart, I walked down the road. 

It was the same walk I'd dreamed of once long ago, and though now I was wide awake in the sun, a subtle hallucinatory quality had  nevertheless begun to steal across the land. 

Most of the time, it's not so obvious that this place is on the edge of the desert. In the brutal last days summer, though, with no soft greenery to cushion it. a barren moonscape reveals itself. Layers of memory (it seemed to me) had become exposed like rocks jutting above the surface, the bleached and jagged bones of the earth. 

I remembered my father, my siblings and the neighbors we'd had, and the games we'd played, among the limestone outcroppings that had their own names and the dry creeks and river bed. The agave, a huge, old towering thing, reached its spiky leaves to the sky. The needly hooked tooth edges snagged my attention, the way things do when the world goes strange.

Yes, the landscape was feeling restive, and really, who could blame it? It had been a relentless season

I was halfway down the road and the wind was picking up. Shades of the old dream again, but this time the wind was scorching, hot enough to distort the air. It rattled and hissed and shook the trees. Soon, like the dream, it began to howl. 

No sooner had I reached the place where the two roads met than I felt it, that mysterious, indescribable sense of another reality overlapping my own. I stood there for a while, half-hypnotized by the spinning vents on top of old Mrs. Kirtchner's house, wondering what it was that I felt, and how to even talk about it. But all I could articulate to myself was that I was standing at the edge of Autumn.

Well, hang around a crossroad long enough and you are bound to discover something.

My package was in the mailbox. What was in it? Eh, just stuff. A red herring, as red as my dress in the equinoctial wind.

I walked back home, once again full of knowledge that was beyond me to explain

Feathers and Leaves

Just the usual, wandering downtown, watching the wind blow feathers and leaves on a cloudy afternoon.

Wreath Of Roses

Just because it's so beautiful, it blows my mind. Even the statue with its weapon is helpless against a whirl of rose petals in the wind.

Witchy Weather

Recently, I went out to the cemetery where my ancestors are buried, to leave an offering and ask their advice. I'd been seeing such a falling apart of things, a rapid decay of the world around us, that surely they would have something to say about it.

If the world is falling apart, the cemetery was no exception. While the place had changed little in the 150 years previous, it had taken a sudden turn for the worse. Sinkholes had appeared, gravestones toppled by their own weight, statues and vases broken beyond repair. Even many of the enamel portraits marking the graves as seen here had fallen apart completely. It did not look like the work of vandals, but a sudden, unexplained deterioration.

After leaving my offerings, I walked around while awaiting an answer or a sign. I tidied up the best I could, replacing broken tiles and angel's wings. In the west corner, a sandpiper ran down the mounds of dirt, fluting wildly. We are far from the shore, so this was a surprise. I thought it must have a nest there it was trying to protect, but when I tried to investigate, the bird began to make such a noise and flail around so that I gave in and followed. Afterward, I remembered how my husband had once dragged me away from that same corner many years ago, having been overcome by the feeling he must get me away from there immediately

When the sign came, it was a little hard to understand. It was definitely the sign, but what did it mean? I took a couple of days for it to click.Then I understood, much more than I ever realized.

Today I went out to work the spell, in the bright and sunny afternoon. It was a simple spell, of course, because that is the way my ancestors worked. It was so hot and dry that I watered the plants first, and wetted down the area I was working. The ground was as dry as a bone and beginning to crack. Such is the way of things at the edge of the desert.

I was just finishing when the storm blew up, with a black sky and howling wind, so fast I barely had time to gather my things and get the laundry in before it was soaked. I rushed in to check the weather report, but I already knew what it was. There'd only been a 10% chance of rain. You might think a storm coming up during a spell might be a bad omen, but I know my ancestors and I know me. No, it was a roar of approval, a sign that it had worked just the way it should.

The map bore out my theory. According to the time-lapse radar, the storm had developed suddenly, just about the time I'd started, just over the south side of the county line. Right over the cemetery where my witchy forebears reside.

Just a few minutes later, the sky was sunny again, and ground was no doubt thankful for its brief drenching. As for me, I was delighted. It's always nice when the old folks come to call.

Storm Night

Early in the day, the wind blew hot and cold gusts and whistled close to the ground. But it was long after that, after nightfall, that the storm finally arrived.

Ghoulies, Ghosties And Long-Leggedy Beasties

What, you say, it's the wrong time of year for ghosts? Nonsense. It's always time. And it's always time for a few spooky gifs.

It might be February, but the wind is murmuring eerily in the eaves, and I don't feel as if I'm quite alone here...