Haunting memories can be sweet

Daughter Lillian peeks from the gable of the award-winning haunted house as partner
Lux waves in ghostly fashion and your loyal correspondent poses as a nerdly ghost hunter. Sue Burton photo.

I’M HAPPILY BACK on my little island after enjoying a mainland highlight of my year: the family Halloween party.

After relishing the southbound drive across the autumnal Skagit Valley, enjoying views of crimson-leaved blueberry bushes and the season’s first snow geese, I piggybacked two nights at daughter Lillian’s new digs in Seattle’s Roosevelt district with an overnight at the delightful Magnolia Bluff brick bungalow that is home to former Seattle Times travel-writing colleague Carol Pucci and her husband, Tom Auciello. Collectively, they are popularly known as the Pucciellos.

Skagit Valley blueberry bushes wear their fall crimson as October clouds hug the Cascade foothills.

The Halloween party was last Saturday at the home of my sister-in-law Margaret and her husband, Tom, in Shoreline. It’s been an annual event for almost 50 years, almost half of which have been at Margaret’s home. There’s a trophy awarded for best costume.

Lillian brainstormed our costume effort this year. Lil went as a haunted house. Lil’s partner Lux was a scary ghost (Charlie Brown bedsheet with holes, but with an added “bloodstain”). And I was Todd, chief investigator for Acme Paranormal Investigations LLC.

Lillian’s haunted house was a three-dimensional work of art, created in the media of delivery-box cardboard and tempera paint. It featured boarded-up windows (one of them with simulated broken glass) and a hovering ghost that lit up when she flipped a switch.

I wore plaid suspenders with matching bowtie and carried various ghost-detecting tools, including a hand-operated eggbeater with glittery ribbons that swirled with the beater blades. (The effect often causes nervous ghosts to appear when they don’t otherwise intend to; this is a well-known technique. Honest.)

We won the trophy. Or, more accurately, Lillian won the trophy for their creativity and willingness to wear the costume even as they ate dinner, laboriously transporting forkfuls of enchilada to their mouth despite the constrictions of the gable that wrapped their head.

Competition was stiff, including the two “forensics investigators” who left numbered evidence markers all over the house; the sister-in-law, her daughter and partner who all came dressed as the dad of the family, who has come to the party for years without wearing a costume; our hosts’ grandson who piloted a child-size submersible research vessel created on a 3-D printer by his Boeing-mechanic father; and many more.

Seen from Magnolia Bluff: A sailboat exits Elliott Bay as distinctive clouds frame Puget Sound.

Monday night I accompanied my Magnolia friends Carol and Tom, along with another former Seattle Times colleague, Holly, on a memorable walk along the edge of Magnolia Bluff. A purse-seining fishing vessel circled in the water below us and a sailboat scudded out of Elliott Bay as dramatic autumn clouds ranging from cottony white to gunmetal gray framed the panorama of Puget Sound. We dined at a cozy Thai restaurant in Magnolia Village before returning to my friends’ home to lounge in front of the blazing fireplace and debate the state of the world.

Tuesday I shopped for a month’s worth of groceries, packed them in bulging plastic totes and caught a 3 p.m. water taxi back to my hermitage.

Whew. Winter’s on its way. The pantry is full. Time to catch my breath. Happy Halloween, friends.

A whale of a Halloween

Your correspondent, left, as Captain Ahab, with daughter Lillian Cantwell, a baker by profession (and perhaps a future master of puppetry?), as the White Whale of “Moby Dick.”

LOYAL REEFERS KNOW that Halloween has long been a highlight of the year in my late wife’s family, which for more than 40 years now has been my family, too.

You long-timers make a cup of coffee or work a crossword for a moment while I fill in the newcomers.

Some 40 years ago, my sister-in-law Kathleen and brother-in-law Roly started the tradition of an annual Halloween party for friends and family, including a costume contest. Early on, Kathleen visited Goodwill and found an old bowling trophy that had been awarded to a woman named Mildred. Kathleen removed the chrome-plated bowler and, with a bit of glue and gumption, substituted a wax figure of a witch on a broomstick, like what you might find at a crafts store. Thus was born The Mildred Award for Best Costume, and the competition began. For decades, the Mildred has passed from winner to winner.

Maybe 20 years ago, sister- and brother-in-law Margaret and Tom took over hosting, at their comfortable Shoreline home. Elaborate ghoulish decorations are involved, plus a poignant Day of the Dead altar dedicated to missed loved ones (such as my Barbara and Kathleen’s Roly). This year, the party was this past Saturday.

For years, Barbara and I strove to come up with “theme costumes” featuring the two of us, often with a spooky literary theme. Some old favorites: Edgar Allan Poe and the Raven, and Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. Lots of papier-mâché and chicken wire were key components of the bird and the horse. Many other party-goers have shown equal enterprise. One year, Margaret’s daughter Sarah spent the party scooting around in a creditable replica of a Mars exploratory rover.

This year, daughter Lillian and I decided on another literary theme: the white whale and the crazily obsessed Captain Ahab from “Moby Dick.” There are plenty of spooky aspects to the story.

Lillian, whose partner, Chris, would be traveling with a band tour for a few weeks, had some time on her hands and volunteered to tackle the whale.

She outdid herself. Chicken wire, papier-mâché, clay teeth, poster paint and all.

Moby chats with Mustafa, another party-goer, at the Halloween shindig in Shoreline. Lillian somehow managed to sip a beer from a straw.

I arrived at the party before Lillian. Clad in my foul-weather jacket, faded old captain’s hat and peg leg, with a pipe, a spyglass and other accoutrements, I gruffly quizzed other party-goers whether they’d seen the dad-blasted white whale. I had fun with it. (“I got this deckhand whose name, I’m pretty sure, is Harry, but he keeps telling people to call him ‘Ishmael,’ for some danged reason. And you know my first-mate, Starbuck? That feller can’t even make a decent cup o’ coffee.”)

But it was Lillian’s arrival, not my corny conversation, that wowed the crowd. The big, white sperm whale strapped on to her shoulders, with her face peering out over the large pink tongue inside its gaping mouth full of sharp white teeth. She’d fashioned a base of curling ocean waves and wore a gray cloak to match the color of the sea on a stormy day.

There were other great costumes, as always: An immaculately suited NASA astronaut accompanied by a ray-gun toting Martian girlfriend. A “Barbie” clad in lush pink robes à la ancient Rome (worn by sister-in-law Sarah, the Latin teacher). Docter Quinn, Medicine Woman (aka Julia Burns, R.N.), came toting a blow-up horse. My nephew who is a hard-working writer came as author Dean Koontz, a 78-year-old suspense novelist with a Justin Bieber haircut, as seen on the back of one of his novels.

But Moby Dick made a whale of an impression. We humbly took home the Mildred.

I’m back on my little island. With dinner, I plan my annual screening of “Arsenic and Old Lace.” If Galley Cat and I get any trick-or-treaters, we’ll report back. We might invite them in for a party. Happy Halloween!

Winning the Mildred, and other highlights of the season

Halloween brought a respite from storms, as Mount Baker towered over Skagit Valley blueberry fields ablush with autumn color.

GETTING OFF OF THE ROCK means even more to me these days when it includes an actual social event, with real people who are all vaccinated and not wearing masks.

Well, there were a few masks at the social event of which I speak, but not the kind you’re thinking.

Halloween was a treat last Sunday, as it always should be, and moreso this year because it brought the almost-post-COVID return of the annual Burns Family Halloween Party, a highlight of the social year for me and my late wife’s family since, oh, probably the late 1970s. The pandemic caused its cancellation in 2020.

Mary and her monster. Note the clay heart in Lillian’s hand, and the jumper cables hanging from my pocket.

Since its inception, it has been a highly competitive costume party, with a trophy awarded. The legend is that my sister-in-law Kathleen went to Goodwill decades ago and acquired an old bowling trophy that had been awarded to a woman named Mildred. Kathleen replaced the bowling figure with a little waxen witch on a broomstick. Thus was born the Mildred Award for Best Costume, which has been passed around among champions of the sartorially macabre for lo these many years.

Barbara and I took the competition seriously, and over the years came up with thematic costumes that paired together. I was Ichabod Crane and she was the Headless Horseman. I was Edgar Allan Poe, she was the Raven. To mark the 50th anniversary of the first American ascent of Mount Everest, I was an ice-ax wielding Jim Whittaker and Barbara was a crazed-looking, prayer-flag-bedecked yeti. (Thanks to friend Suzy Burton, who has compiled this digital album of costumes from the party over the decades.)

It was tough this year without Barbara. But she was sweetly memorialized in the elaborately decorated Day of the Dead altar that my sister-in-law Margaret always creates as a comforting adjunct to the Halloween celebration. And daughter Lillian stepped up with a brilliant costume pairing idea: She went as “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley, circa 1818, and I was Shelley’s monstrous, galumphing literary creation.

In keeping with the spooky holiday, Mary Shelley fit right in. Not only did she create one of history’s iconic creatures of every kid’s bad dreams, she was certifiably odd in her own way. After her husband, the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned at a young age in a boating accident, she is said to have carried his preserved heart with her wherever she went. So Lillian molded an authentic-looking human ticker from modeling clay and carried it around at the party.

Like the Addams Family, we were creepy. We were kooky. We were altogether ooky. We won the Mildred.

Halloween weekend offered a welcome sunny and calm break from the gales and rainstorms that have beset us of late. It was but a respite, however. As I write this in Nuthatch cabin, the towering firs and maples outside my wall of windows sway alarmingly in high winds. The lowering sun, just emerging from rainclouds, flickers through the teetering trees like a blinding locomotive headlight of cold, pastel yellow. Cast in stark shadow, waving branches bearing autumn’s last leaves dance enchantingly across my cabin wall.

It’s November in the Northwest. I enjoy clement weather, but when I think on it, to live without seasons would be, well, monstrous.