Where Halloween lives year-round by Donna D. Pistole

The bookstore. Or better still, a library.

A home away from home.

For some more home than home, for a home may be only a house, but a bookstore holds feasts for your heart and soul and mind. And your body, too, is gifted: by the comforting weight of the book in your hand, the rustle of the pages as you turn them, and, if you are lucky, a full moon’s light shining through the window near the chair where you sit.

In a way, it is always Halloween in a library, a hallowed space that welcomes you into its universe.

There you find in its offerings the ghosts of the past and the ghosts of the future, as well as the beings in between, all those whose lives and minds you enter and, for at least a while, become a part of. 

Skeletons in the closet fill the mystery novels that draw you in. 

Find a pumpkin in a cookbook.

Meet spiders and bats and eery black cats in a place where nothing can harm you.

Escape from a present that weighs you down, float off to where you are light and can fly like a witch to wherever you wish. 

Travel in time to the long-ago or yet-to-be with history and science fiction.

Or travel back to your childhood with that first book that you remember read by you or to you. 

The bookstore, the library.

So many universes in a single place, one where Halloween lives all year ‘round.