The Missing Altar
I’ve always had an elaborate ancestral altar in my home. I like to do it up proud—bells and whistles, teacups, bits of jewelry, and the poetry my mother wrote. It always gets extra attention around Samhain, and we’re almost at that threshold again.
Last Samhain, the photos and mementos were lined up on the kitchen table, waiting to be arranged. But due to unforeseen circumstances (I still don’t know what they were), the altar didn’t make it in our cross-country move. It exists somewhere between houses and miles, or who knows maybe it’s residing in some picturesque place on the other side. Thankfully, the photos and small sacred things survived the journey.
Yet absence, I’ve learned, is also an altar. It asks you to begin again.
The missing ancestral altar feels like one of those living metaphors the universe gifts us, a reminder that what we honor doesn’t vanish, it migrates, it shapeshifts, it makes room for something else.
Last year I wasn’t up to building another, but this year, with my daughter and grandson home, it feels right. I’m excited over gathering wood and paint and preparing the ancestors for their new dwelling. We’ll build again and fill the space with what remains and what’s been reborn, photographs, bits of jewelry, and the scent of cookies cooling on the counter. The ancestors will find it. They always do.
A Glimpse into my novel, Thistle Bay.
Meet Bones, the white-as-moonlight familiar who guards the garden gates of Thistle Bay and my own hearth alike.
He has one eye on the living & one on the departed.
The following isn’t a scene from the book, but it does offer a window into the world of Thistle Bay and its inhabitants.
Star watched as the fog unrolled itself over the yard, soft as unspun wool. The bells in the ash tree began their small dance, rising and falling like breath. She looked toward the orchard and nodded at the realization that it was almost Samhain again—the turning hinge of the year when the living and the dead lean toward one another and listen.
Bones, the year-old cat, white as moonlight, had appointed himself Keeper of the Threshold, Guardian of the Hearth. He is an unusual hybrid, one part Maine Coon, one part Persian, born in Russia, lived in Egypt for nine months, and somehow landed on First Street in Thistle Bay. His weathered passport, complete with shot records, was tied around his neck with a frayed ribbon when he appeared. He headed straight for the B&B and never left.
Bones arrived just a few days before Star, a quiet herald of her coming, though no one put two-and -two-together. When Wren spotted him on the property, she claimed him instantly. He has one blue eye and one amber. Wren insists the blue sees this world, while the amber gazes into the next. Though young, Bones carries himself like an old, salt-worn seafarer.
Each dawn he pads through the garden, his pom-pom tail flicking like a snow-covered branch as he makes slow rounds through the cat graveyard. He brushes against each cross as though waking old friends, then settles by the Brighid altar covered in stones, beach glass, rosemary sprigs for remembrance and a single votive trembling in its glass.
When the fog thickens, it’s hard to tell where the world ends and the veil begins.
Inside, Star bakes rosemary remembrance cookies for the ancestors. The scent threads through the open window and out into the mist, like an offering.
Folklore says rosemary keeps the memory of the dead close, its smoke calling them home gently. I like to imagine the fragrance finding Bones, and curling around him like an ancestral shawl.
Does anyone else keep an ancestral altar? What always finds its way onto yours?
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