Halloween Stake

Before the pumpkin, it was a turnip.

The jack-o'-lantern came over from Ireland, where the story goes that a man named Stingy Jack got himself barred from both heaven and hell and was sent off to wander with a coal in a hollowed-out turnip to light his way. Households carved their own and set them in windows and along walls on the last night of October — turnips, beets, mangel-wurzels, whatever the field gave.

Then the Irish arrived in America and found the pumpkin. Larger, softer, hollow already, and orange. Nobody went back to turnips.

So the lantern is the oldest part of the whole business, older than the costumes and much older than trick-or-treat, which is an American invention barely a century old. Three of them hang on this branch, cut through with a web, a bat, and a spider under a crescent moon.

The web is worth a word. An orb weaver takes down her whole web most mornings and eats it — the silk is protein, and she is not going to waste it — then spins a fresh one before dark. What looks abandoned on your porch railing at dawn is usually a bird that ran through it in the night.

And the bat is on your side. A colony works through an enormous quantity of night-flying insects between dusk and morning, which is the reason a farm with bats in the barn has fewer moths in the corn.

Set it where it will be lit from behind at dusk — the tree by the walk, the porch post, over the door. It reads best in October, when dark comes early.

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