BY MARIANA LOUIS
Candy Corn Saturdays
My mother had a name for those rare autumn days. The days when you’d shuffle into the car in the gray of morning, shivering in your fall jacket as the trees flickered by, getting progressively golder, browner, redder, as you flew down the Grand Central Parkway toward the eastern coast. The days when the sun slowly pushed through the celestial gauze and opened up in easy yellow ripples of early afternoon that made you tear off your jacket and cast it away onto the car floor. The days when your braid would come undone strand by strand as you cranked down the window to gulp the warming sea-salted air and stare up at the hawks looping in lemniscates overhead.
The days when the best thing to eat was pancakes and strawberry syrup, your smiley face of eggs and sausage peeking over at you with their weepy, yolky eyes as you dropped at least $3 in quarters to the claw machine for a peach-colored stuffed puppy with blank, black beaded eyes. The days when you’d serpentine through those old Suffolk County roads, stopping off to place a stone on Jo-Jo’s grave before beginning the search for apples or pumpkins or gourds, always on the hunt for the reddest, the roundest, the weirdest one.
The days when you drove right into the roaring gaze of the setting sun, silently gnawing piece after piece of candy corn, as if afraid it would all disappear with the coming dark. The days when you forgot the dark, when you forgot the shadows that followed you along the edges, when you forgot the cold fear that had swallowed up your mother’s heart and the cold of winter that was closer than you could tell. The days when your own heart felt free to love, to be loved, as if love was the easiest thing that ever was, the safest thing, as if all of it was for you, because of you.
The days when you believed that you were special, but also simple, when you felt the preciousness of living, when you knew that there was no other meaning in your little life but to be alive inside of it, to meet the sun and sea and earth, to enjoy sweetness when you had it. The days when infinity was a long car ride under the naked sun in the chill of late autumn, and to be exactly as you were was all there was.
I should have always known my mother would die on a day like this. A day in late October when the crimson leaves of our old maple tree still held onto the branch, and when the sparrows that
lived in her hydrangeas chirped like it was summer though the purple flowers were long gone. A day when the wind was quiet, the sun shimmering and cool, the sky that perfect painted blue, and just a dollop or two of dense clouds passing overhead. A day when the light filtered in through the stained-glass stickers my mother had placed over every arched window, and the sweet century-old musk lifted up from the wooden floors. A day when all the years seemed to gather behind you and the world was all horizon ahead. A day when there was nothing left to do but witness. A day to watch as the rage slipped away, the guilt slipped away, when forgiveness was unspoken and easy. A day to at last break the cold barrier of touch, and take her hand as her yellow-ringed eyes opened and sank away. A day to whisper of love where love was thought to be lost.
My mother named those rare autumn days because such things must be named. The days when we are sparkling and alive, and then days we hold vigil in the shining hours of death. The days when we can look at what was through what is now and remember all of it with grace. The days when the angels that haunted us return to our side and fold their wings around the holy moment that is the most fragile and terrible and cherished thing we have known. The days when we know we are as special as we were once promised to be, and also becoming always more human. The days when we hold life as it is, warm and easy and true, and do not ask it to change, but know in a day, an hour, a minute, everything will.
Mariana Louis is a professional tarotist and spiritual educator, and a mystic of the human heart. After discovering the work of Carl Jung and exploring the psychology of soul, Mariana left her career as a musical theatre performer and returned to academia earn her master's degree in Western Intellectual Traditions, where she focused on archetypal transformations of the Divine Feminine and occult philosophies. She then began Persephone's Sister, a platform for psycho-spiritual wisdom, primarily through the lens of depth psychology and tarot. Mariana is also a part-time poet, lyricist, and aspiring novelist, delighting in the works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hildegard von Bingen, and Paul Simon. She lives contentedly with her Taurus husband and two feline familiars in Astoria, Queens.