Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

  They tell me the season hasn't changed. That it's still autumn. And yet, everything feels different. Painfully so.  On the mornings I have a little extra time, I drink my coffee outside, just as I did in October. And I look up at the trees, up at the sky that once seemed to radiate anticipation and excitement, and listen to the wind that once seemed to whisper the secrets of a thousand ghosts; carry the voices of hundreds of pumpkins from miles around as their candles illuminated their mouths, and I see nothing but death and desolation. I watch the leaves fall, brown and brittle. They remind me of dry, cracked skin in winter, ready to split open and bleed...bleed out the last of autumn, only their blood is invisible. Colorless, like November itself. I watch a sad group of leaves scatter about, scurrying like the family members that stayed too long at the party and now politely being shooed away. I notice one of them hitting newly every branch on the way down, as if trying to...

  Post-Halloween depression is something I've dealt with for my most of my life.  Even when I was much younger and didn't have the language to describe how I was feeling, I remember the agonizing feeling of knowing I would have to wait another year upon returning home for the evening on October 31st. There were many Halloween nights where I would cry that it was over, or go to bed wishing the Halloween night I'd just experienced was a dream, so that I could wake up and do it all over again for real. There was the year I tried to extend it with  Halloweek , and the year when I was  fourteen , when I think I really started to figure out how to express it, and recognize the longing that I felt all year round. I even once started writing a story about a little girl discovering she was actually a witch, after grappling with post-Halloween depression for several years in a row.  This has always been who I am.  But recently I saw something that bothered me a bit, ...

  I went on a drive today. The sky was grey and gloomy, and yellow leaves on almost-bare branches painted it, a little more staggered now than they'd been a two weeks ago.  The wind made them dance, along with the already-brown leaves on the ground, occasionally swirling up and around, as if wondering where to go from here.  Pumpkins smiled at me from some doorsteps; perhaps more than I was expecting in this pre-Christmas world we've entered. Their smiles were different now, though. Less enthusiastic, more melancholy, more knowing.  I could almost hear their thoughts, contemplating the season's end, just so happy to be noticed. It is still autumn, after all.  Decorations lingered on some houses. Hanging ghouls plastered to trees by the on-and-off rain. Twelve-foot skeletons left standing alone, as their more easily packed up brethren have been gone since November 1st morn. Orange lights now shining like a beacon to no one at all.  It's hard to believe these...

 One year when I was much younger, around middle school age, I think, I was out trick-or-treating and stumbled upon a house whose front porch was adorned with orange lights. It sounds so commonplace now, but back then, in the late 90s or early 2000s, whichever it was, huge Halloween displays with bright lights and things like that, weren't really a thing yet. I remember walking up the stairs to that doorway, and feeling so enchanted. Like I was in the middle of a jack o'lantern, or some other realm entirely.  No one answered the door there; I assume they were probably out trick-or-treating with their own children, but I couldn't help but linger. I remember my aunt, down in the driveway, trying to wave me back, telling me I wasn't going to get any candy there.  And I knew that. I just didn't want to leave. Somehow it just felt right for me to be standing within those lights. I felt like my truest self there, somehow, like I was right where I was supposed to be.  It w...

I woke up this morning still a trick-or-treater looking for a brightly lit porch.  My heart and soul are always searching for the glowing pumpkins, the skeletons, the spiderwebs... It can't really be over, can it?  How can something be seasonal when it feels so much like home? How can the version of the world without the pumpkins and skeletons and spiderwebs, be considered the real one? How can October only be 31 days? How can last night feel so long ago and like seconds ago at the same time? I walk through the neighborhood and I hear the leaves fluttering behind me. They sound like urgent footsteps, running and running as if begging October not to forget them. If I chase after them, can I go to? To wherever it is October goes when it's gone? The word November has always hit me like a ton of bricks. It sounds like a door closing, the end of a chapter in a book where a beloved character dies.  A solemn reminder that it's all over. Halloween, October...all just a memory now...

I am on a walk. Likely the last walk I will take in my neighborhood before Halloween has passed.  Also likely the last where so many leaves will still be on the trees. We're expecting storms tomorrow, a gloomy day before Halloween. As I walk, I can't help but wish to find myself entrapped in some kind of time loop.  It doesn't seem fair that the next time I walk these streets, so many of the decorations will be gone. The feeling in the air will have evaporated, gone for a whole year yet again. I look at the road in front of me and I see the stress of the holiday season. I see springtime allergies. I see the inevitable battle with summer and the depression it brings me. To think I will have to endure several months of neverending blinding daylight and stifling heat again before this all returns is almost too much to bear, even though it's only the 29th of October.  I'm just not ready for it to be over yet. I look around and try to see if I can find the portal. The po...