鬼月

Today is the Ghost Festival according to the traditional Chinese calendar. It's an observance I tend to forget about because the local Asian communities don't celebrate it in a big way and there's no special food for it comparable to Chinese tamales for the Dragon Boat Festival or mooncakes for Mid-Autumn. Although it started out as a Buddhist memorial for the dead, in some places it's transmuted into a celebration of the ghoulish in a manner almost exactly parallel to Halloween in the West, so my observance of it consists of reading traditional ghost stories. If we had any J-horror in the house, I'd watch that.

The Chinese calendar seems to be running awfully late this year. Normally we'd be gearing up for the Mid-Autumn Festival about now, but that's not for another month (or, rather, another moon). Moonrise was too early yesterday evening for me to make it to the lakeshore to watch it, but I did run to the topmost of the decks and catch the moon shortly after it had cleared the trees and while it still had some oranginess in its complexion.

The decks are almost unnervingly quiet these days. The Other Gay Couple were good people, as were the Nice Lesbian Couple next door, but they were also the kind of people who thought nothing of having a shouted conversation from their back doors with someone standing out in the alley. The lesbians had two or three boundary-pushing youngsters to boot. Now that they've all moved away and Scooter's problem child is with her birth father for the time-being, the only drama we're subjected to on the back porch is that we make for ourselves by discussing the political situation (either within the association or in the country as a whole).