Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

  This past Saturday, I received possibly the worst type of news someone can ever receive regarding a loved one. I was notified that my cousin was shot and killed.  For the sake of the ongoing investigation, and of course the privacy of my family and those closest to her, I'm not going to name any names here. But there is so much about her I want to talk about. For the remainder of this post, I will refer to her by a name she often asked to be called in childhood, as her absolute passion in life was ballet. Her name, for the sake of this post, will be Clara.  Clara was significantly younger than me, born in 1996. She was the first of my younger cousins whose birth I truly understood and got excited about. I remember being so happy that my aunt's due date was in September. I was actually hoping that the baby and I might share a birthday, but Clara wound up being born closer to the end of the month. Still, though, we wound up having quite a bit in common. My other cousins w...

  Summer is the angry flame of a million discarded Jack O'Lanterns.   So many of us wither and die, but there are many of us that survive.  Perhaps 'survive' is too strong of a word, but we continue to exist. Rotting. Fading. But holding on for the promise of a new October.  The wait is long and hard as we waste away on porches or in abandoned woods. We know our time will come again, but it never seems to get here.  We relish in what we can find in the interim; the little scraps we can salvage. The cold, ghostly silence of winter. The spring breeze that's not too much warmer than fall's, if you close your eyes.  But by summer, we are tired. We have grown weary of waiting, and we're tired of the pain that the change of seasons continues to bring. It is but a single step away. So close we can taste it. So near we can almost smell the air.  The heat is excruciating; the sun beating down upon us as if trying to force us into some type of submission. Is ev...

This is probably due to that one chapter in Karen’s Pumpkin Patch , the children’s book I wasn’t expecting to resonate with me even half as much as it did, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the night before Halloween. In most areas, it’s known as Mischief Night, but I’ve heard it referred to by other names too, such as Devil’s Night, Cabbage Night, and, as it is referred to in my area of northern New Jersey, Goosey Night. (Also worth noting, it’s my mother’s birthday. I asked her to trade me several times throughout my childhood, as a part of me didn’t think she “deserved” a Halloween-related birthday as the holiday meant very little to her.) I long wondered why it was called “Goosey” night. As a young child, I thought that there must be some famous goose that I knew nothing about, that had laid her eggs on a house many years ago, hence the “egging” tradition, but the true explanation seems much more simple: “Goosey” was just a term synonymous with being foolish or flighty ...