Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

  One of the strangest things about autumn is how you can watch it deteriorate. It comes in so bright and beautiful, so alive, despite it all. Everything is so colorful. The world seems to be bursting at the seams in anticipation of a celebration; posing for a picture of a moment in time that will gone all too soon. Each time the wind blows it feels like a pleasant hello, the leaves waving.  The world feels full of potential. And acceptance. So much acceptance.  Halloween comes, and then it goes. And suddenly everything goes strangely silent. From magical to mournful. It's like being at an amusement park after it closes. Everything is still there, it's just so quiet and hollow now. Eerie, almost. Desolate in a way that doesn't quite make sense. It looks almost the same...shouldn't it feel the same? The last leaves flutter to the ground, and I can't tell if they're sad to go or desperate to catch up to their brethren. Afraid to be left behind.  Then suddenly they...

 I watched a movie yesterday on a whim that wound up making quite an impression on me, and I wanted to share a quick review of it, in the hopes that maybe this will find the right people in the next few days, and become a fun little part of someone else's Thanksgiving celebration. While browsing movies on Tubi after a particularly trying holiday-season morning at my retail job, I ran across a movie called The Last Thanksgiving. It seemed to be in a similar vein to a lot of the independent Halloween-set horror movies that I love so much, and also on par with how my day was already going, so I decided to give it a watch. At just over an hour and ten minutes in length, it seemed like the perfect little bite-size distraction, in the spirit of the gloomier, heavier side of autumn. The Last Thanksgiving tells the story of a "dysfunctional family" type group of restaurant workers, grappling with the fact that their manager has chosen to open the restaurant on Thanksgiving Day. T...

  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...