Scary Stories for Halloween

 --Early Halloween morning, rain battering the windows, knowing that it can find its way in if it just batters long enough.  I think about leaks and wind driven rain, and I touch the towels to keep track.  I also keep an eye on the street, gauging whether or not to move both cars to the driveway where there will be less threat of flooding.  And there's no tropical system delivering these flooding rains, the 3rd or 5th or who can keep track anymore flooding rains this month.

--A friend in Atlanta posted pictures of tree branches that had crashed through roof and then the ceiling of his house.  This damage is from Hurricane Zeta as it moved inland.  My friend is in Atlanta, which is in northern Georgia, roughly 450 miles from where the hurricane first crashed ashore.  How far inland must we go to be safe from hurricanes in an age of global warming?

--I'm also seeing pictures of people's Halloween decorations covered with snow--not quite as scary, but sobering nonetheless.  

--My Halloween decorations don't show you how warm it is in South Florida, highs still in the 90's.

--It's Halloween in a plague year, where various countries are setting new records when it comes to counting cases.  The scary stories practically write themselves.

--Yesterday I got a copy of Poets and Writers that I ordered because I wanted to read Sandra Beasley's article on MFA programs that have shut down (I can't provide a link because it's not online, which is why I bought the magazine).  It's a scary story on its face, but the substory was scary too.  It was also a tale of people in charge who had to prove to people in charge up the administrator ladder that expenses were valid and programs were essential, and in many cases, they couldn't do it, through no fault of their own.  It's a story of changing situations where there likely is no fault, at least not fault that can be given to a single person/department/board of trustees.  The article is worth the price of the magazine.

--Yesterday I read another article that's so well written, so inspiring, yet also scary:  Monica Hesse's "Kamala Harris knows things no vice president has ever known" in The Washington Post.  It begins with this paragraph:  "In the week before the country potentially elects its first female vice president, I’ve been trying to write a sweeping essay about progress and trailblazers and glass-breakers and what it all means. But what I keep thinking about is this: At some point in Kamala Harris’s life, someone has instructed her to carry her keys like a weapon when she walks to her car. Someone has said, Get them out of your purse even before you leave the grocery store. Arrange them between your fingers, and if someone attacks you, aim for the face."  What a shiver it gave me!

--But the end of the article made me cheer:  "How someone must have told her, once, to use her keys as a weapon in a parking lot. How something like that shapes you. How it hopefully makes you into a person who never lets anyone walk in the dark alone."