Notes from my Knapsack 10-9-2025
Jeff Gill
Haunted by both pasts and futures
___
October's lengthening nights are creeping back into our evenings.
Time change isn't until November, so we will keep sunsets on the other side of 6:30 pm, but as soon as we enter next month that will "fall back" to before 5:30 pm, and pass 5:00 pm by month's end.
We also tend to be more reflective this time of year. Winter and Christmas offer the happy distractions of celebration; right now we look forward to Hallowe'en with a mix of anticipation and dread. You know, ghosts and ghouls and all those giant skeletons they're selling at home repair stores.
Being haunted is right in line with the seasonal circumstances. It's a time we think of those who have gone, who've passed on, who have died, recently or long ago. I'm a cemetery visitor in part as a historian, because there are stories in stone you can pick up on that the internet might not help you find. Put them together, and you get insights into stories long buried, past tragedies, lasting sorrows.
You can also be haunted, in a very similar way, by the future. That's right, haunted by the future. There's quite a bit of it going around now, in fact. When we usually speak of hauntings, it's the half-seen, half-imagined outline of who or what once was, and how they are gone, but still exerting a pull on our hearts and minds. A ghost, in general terms.
We are haunted right now by half-seen, half-imagined shades of what we fear is yet to come. We can't know for sure, but there's a distinct image, even if daylight shines right through it, of what we anxiously anticipate.
Ghosts from our past dangle from leaf-stripped tree branches, howling with winds growing chill and sharp. Our future oriented ghosts sway around the angular extensions from a nest of cranes, seen north of the highway into Columbus; they wail with suggestions of farmland lost and old homes leveled for rows and rows of newer boxy houses.
These hauntings influence our hearts and minds like ghosts of the past, but they're even trickier because they have even less anchor in facts and markers and reality than typical ghosts. They're the ghoulish worries of what might be, projected out before the changes that are already with us, like elongated shadows in earlier evenings.
Practically speaking, change was coming to the Granville area well before anyone thought about computer chips being made here. We saw AEP and Bob Evans and Abercrombie & Fitch and the "Beauty Campus" all march towards Beech Road and cross it, heading for Mink Street.
We're haunted by the prospect of long, windowless buildings tromping across the landscape right up to the edge of Wildwood Park, and by visions of subdivisions without number spreading north and south of Rt. 16, reaching around the village in an unavoidable embrace. Ghosts of a future we fear.
We fear ghosts in part because we will die, ourselves, and others we love will too. So there's a dread and sorrow we pull in from the past into our present lives. Likewise, Granville is changing, will change… has changed, and will continue to change. Not changing is like not dying. It's not one of the options available.
So we need find ways to tease our fears, mock some of our more extreme worries, trick-or-treat door-to-door our way through a different approach to what's happening. Don't let ghosts of the future overshadow your today.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got his ghosts. Tell him what haunts you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Jeff Gill
Haunted by both pasts and futures
___
October's lengthening nights are creeping back into our evenings.
Time change isn't until November, so we will keep sunsets on the other side of 6:30 pm, but as soon as we enter next month that will "fall back" to before 5:30 pm, and pass 5:00 pm by month's end.
We also tend to be more reflective this time of year. Winter and Christmas offer the happy distractions of celebration; right now we look forward to Hallowe'en with a mix of anticipation and dread. You know, ghosts and ghouls and all those giant skeletons they're selling at home repair stores.
Being haunted is right in line with the seasonal circumstances. It's a time we think of those who have gone, who've passed on, who have died, recently or long ago. I'm a cemetery visitor in part as a historian, because there are stories in stone you can pick up on that the internet might not help you find. Put them together, and you get insights into stories long buried, past tragedies, lasting sorrows.
You can also be haunted, in a very similar way, by the future. That's right, haunted by the future. There's quite a bit of it going around now, in fact. When we usually speak of hauntings, it's the half-seen, half-imagined outline of who or what once was, and how they are gone, but still exerting a pull on our hearts and minds. A ghost, in general terms.
We are haunted right now by half-seen, half-imagined shades of what we fear is yet to come. We can't know for sure, but there's a distinct image, even if daylight shines right through it, of what we anxiously anticipate.
Ghosts from our past dangle from leaf-stripped tree branches, howling with winds growing chill and sharp. Our future oriented ghosts sway around the angular extensions from a nest of cranes, seen north of the highway into Columbus; they wail with suggestions of farmland lost and old homes leveled for rows and rows of newer boxy houses.
These hauntings influence our hearts and minds like ghosts of the past, but they're even trickier because they have even less anchor in facts and markers and reality than typical ghosts. They're the ghoulish worries of what might be, projected out before the changes that are already with us, like elongated shadows in earlier evenings.
Practically speaking, change was coming to the Granville area well before anyone thought about computer chips being made here. We saw AEP and Bob Evans and Abercrombie & Fitch and the "Beauty Campus" all march towards Beech Road and cross it, heading for Mink Street.
We're haunted by the prospect of long, windowless buildings tromping across the landscape right up to the edge of Wildwood Park, and by visions of subdivisions without number spreading north and south of Rt. 16, reaching around the village in an unavoidable embrace. Ghosts of a future we fear.
We fear ghosts in part because we will die, ourselves, and others we love will too. So there's a dread and sorrow we pull in from the past into our present lives. Likewise, Granville is changing, will change… has changed, and will continue to change. Not changing is like not dying. It's not one of the options available.
So we need find ways to tease our fears, mock some of our more extreme worries, trick-or-treat door-to-door our way through a different approach to what's happening. Don't let ghosts of the future overshadow your today.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got his ghosts. Tell him what haunts you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
