I was nineteen, studying abroad, when I spent Halloween night on a train from Waterford to Dublin.
We had spent the day in Waterford, touring the factory (when it was still open to the public) and buying the iconic crystalware. By the time we boarded, it was dark, and the window became a kind of screen. Out past the glass, in backyard after backyard, there were bonfires. Not one or two. Nearly every yard along the line had its own fire burning.
I remember how riveted I was. I pressed toward the window like a kid, trying to take in all of it before the train carried it away.
I had no idea what I was looking at.
What I didn’t know
I knew Halloween as costumes and candy. I didn’t know that I was in the country where the holiday took shape, or that the fires had a name older than the one I’d grown up with.
I wondered, on that train, how the Irish celebrated Halloween. If they trick-or-treated. If it looked like home. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why every yard had a fire.
The answer, I learned much later, was Samhain.
In the old Gaelic calendar, Samhain marks the end of the harvest and the turn into the darker half of the year. It sits at the midpoint between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. Fires were lit as the light waned. The season was understood as a threshold, a time when the boundary between this world and the other thinned, and when the dead and the ancestors were thought to draw near.
I had watched that tradition from a moving train, long before I knew its name.
The thing about not knowing
What stays with me is not the fires themselves. It’s the pull.
Nobody had taught me anything about Samhain. I had no framework, no context, no reason to care about a backyard bonfire in a country I was only visiting. Still something in me went completely still and completely attentive, the way it does when I walk into a place I somehow already know.
I’ve written before about practices that feel like remembering. This was an early one, and I didn’t recognize it as that. I filed it away as a vivid memory from a good trip.
Years later, that trip made its way into the second book. Sophia recalls studying abroad in the story, and I gave her a small piece of what that time felt like. I didn’t connect the fires to anything then either. I only knew that some memories insist on being kept.
What the fires were for
Now when I think about the bonfires, I think about what they were doing.
They were a way of meeting the dark on purpose. The light was going, and the answer was to light something, gather around it, and acknowledge the turn together. They didn’t pretend the dark wasn’t coming. They didn’t ask it to leave. They made a warm place to stand inside it.
There is something in that I find steadying as the year tips. The season of going inward isn’t a punishment or a loss. It’s the part of the cycle where the old stories come out, the ancestors are remembered, and the quiet work happens.
I’ve spent most of this month writing about what we carry and who we carry it for. Samhain is the one night built around the same question. Who came before you? What do you want to say to them? What are you ready to set down?
This Saturday
Samhain falls on Saturday. If you light a fire, or a lamp, or simply sit in the dark for a few minutes, you’ll be in good company. People have been doing it, in one form or another, for a very long time.
I won’t be on a train this year. But I know exactly what I’ll be thinking of.
