Halloween Night at Jack O’ Lantern Blaze

We celebrated our 2017 Halloween night at Jack O’ Lantern Blaze. It was a clear but cold evening, with an all but full moon in the sky. After visiting Mom at 8:50 pm, we went on 9A, and chose the exit for Harmon Station. We had to stop hard well before the exit, for there was a longest line of vehicles ever seen, waiting for the right turn to go to the blaze. Five minutes’ motionless wait later, Paul decidedly pulled our car out of the waiting queue, and raced to the next exit. He used the local route and ShopRite parking lot to be not only on time, but five minutes earlier than our 8:30 entrance time.

Once inside, we were delighted to greet our old friends of the Headless Horseman, dragon, mushrooms and sunflowers. There was an endless throng of visitors, many of whom were dressed in Halloween costumes, such as a family of skunks, owls, or fully decked female Michael Jacksons. As if echoing to the public desire’s to return to animals, the blaze featured and introduced variously carved nocturnals, such as bats, opossums, and rats carved out of pumpkins, in addition to long standing animals like cats, snakes, spiders, dinosaurs, or favorite world of the dead, e.g., Washington Irving and other early settlers, tombstones, ghosts, vampires and zombies. 

We were also treated with a series of new programs like a moving train of circus animals. According to one of the posters, Westchester County is the earliest place to start circus animals in America, with an elephant as its first actor. The Statue of Liberty is another new addition, raising visitors pride as well as patriotism to be an American, especially on the very day of lower-Manhattan’s terrorist attack. 

One greeter told us that 10,000 pumpkins were used for the blaze. Several companies were contracted to work on the project since the month of May. We were so delighted to learn that the blaze’s group of four pumpkin carvings won USA 2016 special post stamps. 

The feast of pumpkins made us forget both time and ourselves. It was closing time, past 10:00pm. We left the blaze, with an almost full chip on Paul’s camera. 

Uitwaaien²

This morning, we ventured out to Croton Landing after a day and night’s rain and wind storm. It was cloudy, with the sun peeking out once in a while through multiple layers of grey clouds. There were white clouds, too, floating in the two-toned blue sky, the deep blue overhead, and baby blue near the horizon. The normally calm Hudson River had turned into a sea of choppy brown water full of whitecaps.

Courtesy of Paul Titangos Photography  

There were fewer people walking along the path. However the low number was immediately compensated by ready windsurfers. Before long, one surfer was joined by three more. The especially strong wind, or Uitwaaien² (Uitwaaine squared) as Paul puts it, has its unique functionality: it provides us with both land and water activities.

We experienced the walk in the wind in two entirely different ways. When against the wind, we needed to brace the resistance with all our might. It swept away and scrubbed clean warmth as well as cobwebs from body and soul. It was kind of a refreshing feeling. When with the wind, we needed also to heed its rhythm, or it would brush us off the path easily. A realization dawned on me that it was just like a re-enactment of life. When torrents of change come, following blindly with the trend might not be adequate and secure. Resistance can be also richly rewarded. That’s the beauty of Uitwaaien².

Uitwaaien along Hudson

Paul told me that BBC had broadcast a report on under-used words and mentioned a special Dutch word for “walking in the wind to clear one’s head.” Out of curiosity, we Googled it at our breakfast table and located the spelling and pronounciation for “uitwaaien.”

Even though I did not know it in the past, I was instinctively aware of this special wind’s effect on me in my weekday walks along Chestnut, or weekend walks on East Cliff. So grateful that countless frustrations and disappointments have been dumped roadside, which makes it possible for us to go forward and onward.

This time in our walk along the the Hudson River, uitwaaine is particularly pronounced. It is cool and soothing, reminding us that life is beautiful, even though it is full of ups and downs. It is also like a gentle healing hand, patiently helping us to rebuild our health, by incrementally increasing the duration of our daily walks from half an hour to a full hour and more. 

The walks along the Hudson in Croton-on-Hudson, New York is not quite the same as strolling along California’s Monterey Bay. But it has the same uitwaaien, enabling us to create a newer and clearer mind. I understand that such a state of mind will be again contaminated in no time once back to our daily work. It is a pure joy to relish the pristine uitwaaine once in a while!

Courtesy of wordables