Mailbag: What Your Grandmother Said About October

a reader's kitchen. the pile stays till morning.

Last month I asked for the rules your grandmothers gave you that nobody ever explained. I meant it as a small thing. The box is full. Here are three, from three people who do not know each other, and then I will stop, because some of you are starting to worry me.

"Never sweep after dark. You sweep your luck out the door with the dirt. My grandmother would leave a pile in the corner of the kitchen all night rather than touch the broom after supper. So do I, and my husband has stopped asking."

"Do not put a hat on a bed. Do not whistle in the house at night. Do not point at a grave, and if you do, bite your finger. I have bitten my finger in front of a funeral director and I would do it again."

"When a bird gets in the house, somebody is coming to visit. Not always somebody you want. My mawmaw would open every door and window and say good morning to it, even at night, until it found its own way out."

DocFenwick, who was going to write in regardless, notes that every one of these is documented from one end of south Louisiana to the other, that most of them came over on boats from France and Spain and West Africa and met here, and that folklorists have been writing them down for a hundred years. Doc is right. They are old, they are everywhere, and they are not ours alone.

Here is my read, and it is not a theory. A rule nobody explains is a rule somebody kept. You do not have to know why. Your grandmother did not know why either. She only knew that her grandmother kept it, and that was enough for her, and it is enough for me.

Leave the broom alone tonight.

I relay. You decide.

In Truth and Terror.
— Beau