Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 It's time for another round of 90s Kid Halloween Nostalgia! Sometimes it saddens me that today's kids will likely never know the true magic of Saturday morning cartoons. There was something about that feeling of waking up, maybe earlier than we should have been on a day off, but wanting to make the most of our day, knowing we had two full days of freedom ahead of us. Somehow the cartoon blocks felt like a celebration. As if Saturday was a weekly holiday and Saturday morning cartoons were the party we were always invited to, or the special we waited for with bated breath.  Some of my fondest memories of my childhood weekends are of losing myself in those cartoons for several hours. My favorite block of all was the  One Saturday Morning  block on ABC, run by Disney. It premiered just after I turned ten, and it immediately became a weekly fixture in my life, with me counting down the days until it came back around, and begging my parents not to plan any outings until t...

  It’s truly a strange feeling to look at something and think “I can’t wait to watch you die.” But yet, as the Gregorian months of April and May drone on, propelling us closer to summer with every passing hour, as the leaves emerge and everything becomes an endless sea of green, lightly peppered with other colors that seem manufactured even if they aren’t, that is all I can think. I can’t wait to watch them die. Green leaves are so boring. And the world is so green in the spring. It seems like the decor of a minimalist, married to one color scheme, clean but blah . And I am anything but a minimalist. I don't understand why spring and summer are considered so beautiful; why they make people seem to feel so alive.  I can't wait to watch them die. As I look up at the thick, green leaves, remembering a restaurant I frequented as a child that was built to look like a rainforest, I start to picture them in all sorts of vibrant hues of orange, yellow, red, even brown. I can't wait...

I believe I was fourteen years old the first time I tried to calculate the halfway point to Halloween. Fourteen  was the year I started to jtruly accept my eternal longing for Halloween as a part of me; a bigger part than I ever allowed myself to acknowledge in such a way before. I can't remember exactly how I did it. I just remember this little purse-sized calendar I'd gotten from a local Hallmark store, full of spooky doodles and quotes and sayings despite the fact that it had a pastel flower on the front and a list of traditional wedding anniversary gifts on the final pages. (I pondered these often. Paper? Clocks? Did anyone abide by this?) That calendar was like me. Outwardly very girly, very much what you'd expect from a basic female of my age, but the inside was full of everything I was afraid to express.  On the first page, like a warning, I'd written I like black cats and bats. Somewhere in the middle, a pair of eyes drawn over the calendar boxes of whichever mo...