A Candle in the Window

They say that my Celtic ancestors, in time before memory, would light a candle in the window on Samhain’s eve, so that the dead could find their way home again. For me, this day—All Hallow’s Eve, the eve of All Saint’s Day, Samhain, the Day of the Dead—is a time to remember my own dead. The faces and memories of those loved and lost. And not completely lost, for they live on in our collective memories and some of them live on in the memory of this place.

This is the day of thin places, of thin borders between the living and the dead, ever sacred to the Celts and to many peoples for its crossing of boundaries.

It troubles me sometimes to wonder if my dead have a home to which they can return. My ancestors are of a people who have wandered ever westward, searching for but rarely finding “a secure life in a land of plenty.” We moved constantly, amid landscapes both grand and marred by an industrial ideology.

My people came west for the jobs promised by a rising industrial power—to cut giant trees, to harvest fruit, to build vast cities that empty the desert of water, to mine rocks, and to lay railroad tracks. Of my great grandparents, one worked on the railroads, another build automobiles. None were every fully settled into place and thus, my ancestors’ final resting places are scattered across the entire west, from the Ohio River to Texas, from the deserts of Arizona and southern California to the forest land of the coastal west.

So, while my ancestors apparently cherished some memories of their respective homelands, by the time my generation was born, we had no idea where we had come from, nor did we have a homeland to speak of.  The memories of the borderlands of Scotland and Ireland, of Spain, or of northern France were only a faint shadow; so too were the more recent home of the Alleghany mountains or of central Canada or the southwest tip of Arizona.

And so my generation anew attempts to create home out of the transient heritage we have been given. My dead, those I personally have lost, lay scattered across several states, and yet firmly rooted in my heart. Somehow, in our random search for home, we have learned to make home on pilgrimage.

So, on this night, I will burn a candle in my window, calling my loved and lost ones home from the four corners of the west, home into my heart.