Through hollow lands and hilly lands

I think this year's Halloween party was a success. There was mulled cider and pomegranates and cranberry cake, the ritual evisceration and inflammation of the sacrificial gourds, and a mix of costumed attendance and not, so that my brother and his fiancée were a pair of vampires (this year, with professional teeth: I watched their smiles confuse pumpkin-buyers at Wilson Farms this afternoon), fleurdelis28 lurked academically as the Raccoon of Furtiveness (with her black-framed glasses and dreamcatcher), lignota called from Alewife a nereid in sea-scrolled blue (white-veiled, braided with shells and coral), and eredien was tamago sushi (with a stacked headdress of pillows, because she is just that awesome); lesser_celery as his childhood namesake pumpkin, nineweaving with the mask and broad hat of one of her guisers, and Eric showed up as a Red Sox fan, which how exactly makes this night different from all other nights? Two friends of the family came, as themselves with beer; a Mithraic friend from Brandeis whom I see far too infrequently unexpectedly turned up; the first-time pumpkin carved by shmeislin's friend whose livejournal handle I do not yet know was a fern-light stunner. (I dressed as a student from the Rijksuniversiteit in Ostia Naye, which exists only in "The Mirror of Venus" and the ongoing novella. It provided a good excuse for the eighteenth-century shirt and the futhark scarf.) The conversation was of excellent caliber. There should be photographs, tomorrow. The rain on the street sounds like the hush of waves.