If you’ve ever listened to Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmnund Fitzgerald, you know of the Witch of November. She’s powerful winds that blow over the Great Lakes combining cold air from the north and warm wind from the south. And she’s got a body count, ol’ Gale.

November is a bit of a cursed month in my family.

It’s your typical list of deaths, diseases, and overall depression culminating in the holiday of Thanksgiving. I hate the food and football, I hate the specials, there’s no good songs. As a Great Laker, November isn’t a resting liminal space between Halloween and Christmas, but a bitter, sixteen week long turbulence which might sink a ship or kill my grandfather.

Thanksgiving was my father’s favorite holiday, thus making it dead to me, and was also the last coherant phone call I had with my dad before brain cancer made him unable to use his phone. And while Lake Superior might never give up her dead, as someone on land, my hands are chapped and my cheeks are raw. It’s not so great being the living on the sandy beach either.

There’s a lot of superstitions around wind. Don’t whistle into it, or you’ll attract bad spirits. A north wind is a bad omen, sudden changes are dangerous. A soft gust is a wish granted, and a strong one can blow you to your destiny like a Greek hero.

Warnings are important, they are humans reaching out to each other in love to prevent harm. Even the most pointless advice can be meant with the tenderest of protection.

But I’ve always struggled with being told what to do. Even by the people who I know have my physical and spiritual safety at heart. Because if whistling attracts the negative spirits, maybe they were the spirits I was looking for. Maybe those are the spirits that were meant to be here with me.

Which is why I consider screaming into the wind a contact sport. An adversarial ritual of truce, a holler of Olly Olly Oxen Free.

“I raised a daughter who wasn’t smart enough to come in out of the rain,” my dad chuckled to me once. Now he’s not here to chide if I fist fight the elements.

And I reserve the right to toss any wish or curse I like into any dangerous storm.

I wonder if that’s what makes a November witch. A cold heart and a hot head, surging surf on the lakes and creating hurricanes and storms so awful they’ve pulled whole crews so deep they don’t decompose. Intact graveyards of sacrifices in the depths of water even the fish don’t loiter.

Change is terrifying because life is temporary. November in its throws of thrashing death remind me to never go quietly. I’ve reached the point where I feel less statisfied clinging to the safety of a gritty strip of frosted shore.

Besides, every body of water is a graveyard, and every windstorm is a witch.

This month I wrote about my adventures trying to find my soulmate from an astrology app, and if you’re looking for a gift for the holidays, check out one of my books.