Perhaps the scariest thing about today for me is that it’s the last day of my fifties. I celebrate my sixtieth birthday tomorrow. I will be spending time with one of my children and some close friends at a convention in Tucson, Arizona. I suspect one of the best things about my age is the experience I’ve gained.
Over the last few decades, I’ve watched Halloween grow from a little one-night event largely for children to an almost month-long celebration of the spooky and macabre. However, where I live in Southern New Mexico, the season doesn’t end with Halloween. In many ways, it’s just getting going. Halloween is really a contraction for “Hallowed Eve” because the next day is All Saints Day. In Spanish, it’s known as Dia de los Inocentes, or the “Day of the Innocents.” The day after that is All Soul’s Day which is the traditional Dia de los Muertos or “Day of the Dead.” Like Halloween, Dia de los Muertos festivities have effectively expanded to cover the three days from October 31 through November 2.
I live just outside the town of Mesilla, New Mexico where a big Dia de los Muertos festival is held each year. On the town plaza, people set up ofrendas, or altars, remembering their loved ones. They often include photos of loved ones and possessions they loved or reminders of things they loved to do. It’s common to set out a loved one’s favorite dish a loaf of pan de muerto, literally the bread of the dead. Marigolds, known in Spanish as flor de muerto, provide a beacon that lead the dead back to the land of the living to spend some time with loved ones. Because my wife passed away earlier this year, a friend of mine and I made an ofrenda to my wife.
The photo above shows the ofrenda. It includes several photos along with crochet items my wife had made. In the cup to the right is green chile stew, one of my wife’s favorite foods. The pan de muerto I made is on the plate at the far right. Over on the far left is one of my wife’s favorite books, The Wizard of Oz. I read my wife a chapter on the Day of the Dead. A farmer who vended at the Mesilla Dia de los Muertos festivities grew the marigolds in the beautiful garland adorning the table. Did they guide the way for the dead? Read on and decide for yourself.
Now, one thing about getting older is that I’ve found that as the autumn progresses and the nights turn cold, so do my feet. I often sleep with an extra blanket over my feet. Now, I’m absolutely positive that blanket was over my feet as I went to bed on the night of Dia de los Muertos. However, I woke up as I’m wont to do somewhere around 3am. As I climbed out of the bed, my feet hit the floor and landed on the blanket that I normally keep at my feet. Now, this is a small blanket and it wasn’t on the floor as though it simply fell off the bed. It was off the bed a couple of feet, roughly in line with my shoulders, just where I would swing around and put my feet on the floor.
It was as though someone had deliberately placed the blanket on the tile floor so my feet wouldn’t get cold as they hit the tile floor of the bedroom.
I literally got chills.
When I take the blanket off the bed for any reason, it goes at the foot of the bed. So, it’s not like I’d taken it off and simply forgot to put it in place.
It’s a small thing and it’s certainly possible to explain this by some more rational means. However, as a writer of the supernatural, it feels a lot like the marigolds guided my wife home for a short time to perform a small act of kindness before she returned to wherever she is now.
In it’s own right, it’s not scary or horrific. Yet it’s just enough to suggest that what we supernatural horror writers write isn’t entirely fantasy.
With that, it’s time for me to take a deep breath and gird my loins. My sixth decade awaits. I look forward to seeing what new surprises I find there.
If you would like to explore Dia de los Muertos in fiction, I highly recommend the story “El dia de Muerte” by Ray Bradbury, which appears in the collection The Machineries of Joy, or even my novel Owl Dance, where a well-meaning alien wreaks havoc at a Dia de los Muertos celebration in late 1800s Mesilla.
