"Recall, reader if ever in the mountains 

a mist has caught you, through which you could not 

see except as moles do through the skin

how when the moist vapours began to dissipate,

the sphere of the sun enters freely through them ,

and your imagination will quickly see how, at first 

I saw the sun again, which is now at its setting"

from Purgatory X11, 1-9

by Dante translator Charles S. Singleton

One morning at the cabin I looked out so see a stream of

fog running thru a low spot where the land dips between the

 ridge where the cabin sits before it rises again, slightly to form 

a finger like peninsula jutting into the slough. The fog moved out

through the brush along the edge of the slough becoming a water

fall of mist pouring down the bank to the water and eventually 

dancing like the narrows before burning off in the morning sun.

Fog is the stuff of magic and mystery.

"In the morning, mist comes up from the sea by the cliffs 

beyond Kingsport. White and feathery it comes from the deep 

to its brothers the clouds, full of dreams of dank pastures 

and caves of leviathan. And later, in still summer rains on the 

steep roofs of poets, the clouds scatter bits of those dreams,

that men shall not live without rumor of old strange secrets, 

and wonders that planets tell planets alone in the night. 

When tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conchs in 

seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, 

then great eager mists flock to heaven laden with lore, and 

oceanward eyes on tile rocks see only a mystic whiteness, 

as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and 

the solemn bells of buoys tolled free in the aether of faery. "

from The Strange High House in the Mist

by H.P. Lovecraft

My wife and I  have a basement full of

Halloween decorations. In the past we hosted

pumpkin carving parties, however the last few

years we have not done much, so I thought it was

time to sacrifice a pumpkin and fight with a few

strings of lights.

( I lost only the spiders are lighting up )

The squirrels have gone crazy for the pumpkin

seeds, the jays are unimpressed.

Also since I am a huge fan of H. P. Lovecraft and have

way too many Arkham House books, Cthulhu toys etc.

I thought in this spooky season nothing would be more

appropriate than a quote from the old gentleman

himself. From the story "A Picture in the House"

an over wrought story but a great opening. 

"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs

of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They

climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black

cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia.

The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they

linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true

epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is

the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient,

lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements

of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the

perfection of the hideous.

      Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses

remote from travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp,

grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock.

Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there,

while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread.

They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and

guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still

stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards

off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things."

The Picture in the House

H.P. Lovecraft