The Magic of Making Things

A Halloween Story

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories.  As always, there is an audio of this post if that suits your needs. In honor of Halloween, I have a special pocket for you. I am going to highlight some fun, spooky books, shows and movies that my family and I love, and then I’m going to tell you a story about what I learned one Halloween many moons ago. Thank you again for being here. If Pocketful of Prose is a treat for you, please consider sharing it with friends.

Photo by Josh Kahen on Unsplash

First, let me introduce you to the work of Lora Senf. I was lucky enough to meet Lora when she visited our school to share about her books and her creative process. Lora is the author of the Blight Harbor Series. I nabbed a copy of The Clackity, which Lora kindly signed for Anna. In The Clackity, the main character, Evie Von Rathe has a “hollow, hurting place in (her) where (her) parents used to be.” When her Aunt Des goes missing, Evie must face her fears to find her. Anna devoured the book in a weekend and told me after finishing it that she wants to read anything else that Lora writes.

When Lora spoke to our students, she shared how when she wants to be inspired, she reaches into her creative well. I had not heard of this concept before, but I love the idea of a creative well where we put things that inspire and feed our creativity. I am still pondering what I would put in my creative well, but for sure it would include Mary Oliver, Krista Tippett’s On Being interviews, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a smattering of garden photos and musings on the natural world as well as a host of other poets and memoir writers.  

Lora’s creative well includes movies, shows and books which have moved and changed her. Her creative well made me want to read her book because some of her favorites were also some of our family favorites. Not surprisingly for an author who likes to write about spooky things, her favorites are fitting of this season. Here are a few of Lora’s recs.

1. Gravity Falls. (My family also loves this show. The above photo is us dressing up as Gravity Falls characters one Halloween. I could not find the pic with me in it.) In Gravity Falls, Dipper Pines and his twin sister Mabel spend the summer with their great-uncle, or “Grunkle,” Stan in Gravity Falls, Oregon, a mysterious town full of paranormal incidents and supernatural creatures. Odd things happen all the time, like Mabel discovering her favorite boy band is actually a bunch of imprisoned clones, but ordinary things happen too like Dipper not wanting to go trick or treating anymore after the girl he likes says trick or treating is for kids. Gravity Falls is about two siblings who really love each other and who are trying to navigate the strangeness of coming of age in a strange, new place.

2. Coraline. This is another family favorite. What could be better than a stop motion animation based on a Neil Gaiman novella? Did I also mention it includes a sweet They Might Be Giants song? If that’s not enough to grab your attention, the characters are created from clay. The movie took four years to make. We were so excited to share Coraline with Anna. It came out when she was two, and we, being good parents, waited another year for her to be mature enough to see it. Three-year-old Anna, though, was having none of it. She was terrified of Other Mother’s button eyes, and she refused to watch the movie again for years. It worked out in the end, as it is now one of her favorite movies.

3. The Horrible Bag of Terrible Things by Rob Renzetti. This one’s new for me, but I can’t wait to try it and to share it with Anna and Seabass as Rob Renzetti was the producer and story editor on Gravity Falls.

Okay, I think I have mused enough on spooky shows you should really check out.

Here is today’s pocket. A quick shout out to Dan’s cousin Laura for walking with me down memory lane and reminding me of some of the things I had forgotten.

My family loves Halloween. For us, it is not about the candy but the costumes.

For her first Halloween, Anna was a pink dinosaur. She wore a pink hoodie that Frances, my mother-in-law, had made many years before for my sister-in-law Meghan.

Frances has sweatshirt superpowers. She can turn any hoodie into magic. See the evidence in the pics below.

Rainbowfish

The Princess and the Pea

Yoda and Princes Leia

When the kids were little, I was grateful to have Frances and Meghan’s help with costumes. At the time, I didn’t consider myself to be an artistic person. In elementary school, I was fascinated by a friend who sewed her own clothes. I wanted to be just like her. I begged my mom to sign me up for sewing lessons, which she did. My mom always supported my whims, but similar to my experience with piano and violin, sewing didn’t stick. That didn’t stop me from chasing this dream a few more times over the course of my life. I was too cheap to pay for my own lessons, but I participated in sewing circles where my friends taught me some basic sewing skills. They made evening gowns and contest worthy quilts. I made napkins.

We still have the napkins, but to this day, I barely know how to load the bobbin in my sewing machine. If my clothes have rips or tears in them, they usually remain that way until Frances visits. Take for example my gorgeously thrifted autumn coat. It is bright orange and radiates cute comfort. Two seasons ago, one of the buttons popped off. I saved it as I always do with buttons, probably in a drawer with other things I have no intention of retrieving. When I wear the coat, a slight chill always enters my chest, in the space where my body is exposed to the cold air due to the lack of button. I have sucked this up for two years instead of spending five minutes replacing the button.

In addition to my lack of sewing skills and common sense, I was grateful to have my family’s help because I was overwhelmed. I was managing motherhood, teaching, tantrums and pets. I lived in a world of cloth diapers and chaos. I felt accomplished if I managed to clean the kitchen counter, or if I made it through the day without the dog eating the contents of the cloth diapers. (I’m embarrassed to admit this happened more than it should have.) Making space for creative endeavors felt like a luxury.

I had a supportive husband, but he sometimes traveled for work for a week at a time, and that travel always seemed to coincide with the kids coming down with stomach flu or the dog deciding it was a good time to eat Seabass’ action figures. Adulting and parenting were hard, and if someone was willing to take something off my plate, I wasn’t about to hold onto the dish.

In addition to Halloween, our family helped with the kids’ birthday parties as well. Every year, Megs would come up with a craft for the kids to do, sea turtle picture frames made from clothespins and recycled cereal boxes, trains made of toilet paper rolls, robots made from paint, pipe cleaners and pink and purple rhinestones.

Anna’s 7^th birthday was a rock and gem party. The kids cracked geodes and made ice cream sundaes which they decorated in sand and volcanic earth (pulverized graham crackers and Oreos) and gems (various candies that we labeled as amethysts, rubies and lapis lazuli etc.) They made their own robots that year, another ingenuous craft Megs came up with. The robots were covered in gems, and the kids paraded around the house with them to the tune of “Robot Parade,” another amazing They Might Be Giants song.

Anna’s seventh birthday was the last one we celebrated with Megs before she died

.

Sometimes, you prepare for the frost, and sometimes it catches you by surprise.

When we lost Megs, our world changed.

There was “a hollow, hurting place” in us where she used to be. It took a long time for us to adjust to our new world, a world without her laughter, without her clever crafts, without her couch snuggles and her amazing ability to curl into the tiniest ball and fall asleep, a world without the love she graciously showered on all of us.

Losing Meghan changed us.

Sometimes it takes someone dying to remind you how you should live.

Those first holidays without Megs were really rough, but Halloween was a gift because for the first time, I spent that season making costumes with my kids instead of delegating the task to someone else. I still couldn’t sew to save my life, but it turns out you can do a lot with a glue gun and a strong will. It didn’t hurt that the costumes only needed to survive one night. That year, Anna, Seabass and I bundled up and headed to the thrift store to locate what we needed. We shouted with excitement when we found yellow sweatpants for Seabass’ wolverine costume. Who cared if the waist had to be rolled over three times? A red boa was perfect for Anna’s scarlet witch. Megs had taught us all a thing or two about the versatility of cardboard, and so the three of us lay on the basement carpet, drawing, cutting and painting our masks, nestled next to each other, anticipating what we might create.

There is a special joy that comes from making something, and that Halloween and every Halloween after that, the kids and I experienced that joy together. I’m pretty sure Megs was with us the whole time, working her magic, reminding us to play, whispering that time is love…

What resonates with you today? What is in your creative well? What spooky books and movies do you recommend? What things do you like to make? What did you learn from someone you loved?

Here’s the heart to click if this post resonated with you.