Beautiful Decay//October 130th, 2021

You hop off the hayride, so excited to be choosing your first real pumpkins of the season.

As a child, you always worried. What if you couldn’t find the right one? Your mother was only going to wait so long for you to make a selection. You didn’t want a pumpkin that was bruised or scratched or soft, or any other kind of imperfect that a pumpkin could be. It had to be just right.

Now, though, pumpkin picking is a full experience. It’s not just about the pumpkins that will ride home with you in the end. Sure, you love to see the excited, sometimes envious eyes of the other patrons of the farm on the hayride back; you even instinctively keep your hands on your chosen pumpkins, just in case someone has the thought that they’re perfect enough to steal. But your time in the pumpkin patch is more precious to you, ultimately, than what you will take home.

As you walk through the patch, taking care not to trip over vines or disturb the pumpkins that aren’t quite what you’re looking for, you take it all in. The pumpkins are all fascinating to you, in their different shapes and sizes. They’re perfect in their imperfections. Even the dents, scratches, warts, and bruises have their strange way of beauty about them. The patch wouldn’t be as interesting, if every pumpkin was just perfect and round.

As you continue on, you see it. A sight that both intrigues and saddens you; a combination of melancholy and poetic beauty. There, among the sea of orange, is a pumpkin that’s rotting, and starting to turn black. You can see the seeds and the liquified guts inside, through the large depression on the side of the pumpkin facing you, a white mold vaguely resembling snow, forming around the wrinkled edges. You wonder how such a hole got there. Was it an unruly visitor to the patch? You hope, if it was, that it was an animal as opposed to a human. You never did understand that pumpkin smashing mentality. Is it, perhaps, that this pumpkin has just sat around too long, never anyone’s choice, and just began to rot all on its own?

Whatever it is, you feel for it. You may be the only person in the patch who even notices it, or walks by it with a thought beyond ‘eww’, and there is a part of you that wishes you could take it with you. You wonder how long it’s been there, suffering in silence like this, and how long it will remain. Will a farmer come by and remove it? Or will it simply waste away into the soil of the pumpkin patch, perhaps helping provide nutrients for next year’s crop?

Either way, you feel sad that it won’t get to experience Halloween like most of its brothers and sisters will. It’s a shame, really. It probably already looks more horrific than any face a person could carve into one of its rounder, untarnished siblings, yet it will never get the chance to truly become part of a display.

You think to yourself, though, that Halloween wouldn’t be the same without these rotting pumpkins. The sight of the exposed seeds and guts, the smell that just vaguely signifies that something is starting to go wrong...It’s death at its finest, and isn’t that, ultimately, what autumn represents?

The Long Way Back//October 32nd, 2023

Every year I talk about November 1st...it's such a confusing day. It makes me feel so many emotions all at once. Mournful, depressed, angry...It's like a slap in the face shoving us into a new month, forcing us to forget what came just hours before. Last year, I did have somewhat of an epiphany regarding the month of November as a whole, and while I do my best to keep my own past words in mind, that doesn't make today any easier. Or easy to explain, for that matter. I suppose I should speak from my heart. Today I feel detached from reality, as if I don't really exist. Like there is no longer a place in the world for me. Just yesterday everything I loved made sense, and was loved and revered by everyone else as well. I felt like I fit. But now, today, I see those same things being quickly shoved away. Less than twenty-four hours after trick-or-treating time began, it's all being swept under the rug. The season culminated and the world is no longer a place I recog

The Spooky Community Has No Entrance Fee//October 288th, 2023

Something I’ve been seeing a lot this year around the Halloween community, possibly more than any other year, has been talk of consumerism, how much money spent on Halloween is too much, whether collecting is really that important or if it’s somehow required to truly be a part of the community, etc. I’m in no way trying to copy anyone else who’s already spoken on this subject, but I thought I would chime in and share my thoughts, as it is something I definitely think about. Now, I’ve always been relatively fortunate when it comes to how much money I have to spend on Halloween goodies. As a child, I often received money for my birthday, September 8th, at the height of the shopping season, at least as I knew it back then. No, it wasn’t enough to collect the way I do now, but it was enough to make me happy, and you also could get a lot more for a lot less back then. I didn’t necessarily stop to think about my “hauls”, but I knew even at a young age that there was nothing I’d rather be sp

Here’s Where The Story Ends//October 337th, 2020

Everyone has moments in their life when they feel like giving up. That feeling of “This is never going to happen, so why keep trying?” Sometimes it relates to a thing that would be trivial to anyone else, sometimes it’s about something more life-altering. But, we’ve all been there. I have moments of discouragement with this blog. Times I’ve told myself, “No one cares”, or “No one will read this”, etc., but I continue on, for the joy of it. And sometimes, something amazing happens. If you haven’t read my previous post, Have You Seen This Pumpkin? , I would strongly suggest doing so before continuing on with this story. The short version is, I saw a pumpkin in someone’s window when I was twelve years old, and have spent the last twenty-one years trying to find it for myself. When I published that post, I wasn’t expecting much of a response. I was really just hoping to hear someone say, “Yes, my family had this pumpkin when I was a kid!” Or “I once saw this in a neighbor’s window while

Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

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