The kids have crowded round in the tall, darkened room. Lame jokes are told, muffled behind plastic masks. I hand out sweets and money.

“Would anyone like some of this? It’s a dragon’s heart!”

I tear open the pomegranate melodramatically, juice spraying, and the garnet-encrusted centre is revealed. A few dare to eat the sweet, seeded drops, discarding bitter yellow substrate. Only later do my children relate that one of the party fled the house in terror.

Finding the deer skull… Walking into the hillside woods, along the forestry track. I’m hungry for solitude and quietness of mind. Breaking off the trail, I descend into the conifers, expecting nothing, just wandering and being with what is.

She’s there on the brown, dead needles, like a pale jewel set on dark velvet. I gently lift her up and carry her home, feeling somehow she’s part of me, some wild and fragile soul spending solitary hours enjoying simplicity among the trees.

Since then, at Samhain, she keeps me company through the festival of the dead, of ancestry, of the endless line of souls we watch as we walk backwards into the future.