Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 Someone asked me once When do you stop mourning the previous Halloween and start looking forward to the next one? That's always been a hard question for me to answer, as I am always looking back or looking ahead, depending on the situation.  I often see what was, and what will be again, simultaneously.  But today, I went for a walk. Probably my first full walk since Christmas time. That last walk, the remnants were still there. Though it was a different holiday entirely, I still met some rotting pumpkins, and some dead leaves clinging to their brittle branches. Then two back to back winter storms came in February, burying us in two feet of snow both times. I don't know that I've ever felt more like I was in alternate reality, or farther away from Halloween. Today was different, though.  When Easter comes, you hear all this talk of spring, and new beginnings, and that sort of thing.  And I guess it never really hit me how that can apply to Halloween as well. Wal...

  My inner child's insistence at embracing Christmas has proven fruitful this year.  I will never love another holiday like I love Halloween. I never have, even as a child waiting for Santa Claus. It's a nice feeling, but never the same.  After plans to take pictures at a nearby farm fell through this afternoon, I decide to go for a walk instead. A short one, as it gets dark early now, and somehow I don't feel nearly as safe as I did when I wandered the neighborhood after dark in October. It's funny how you can feel like you're in a spooky movie, but still feel safer, more at home, than on the most benign of days.  I snap a picture of the landscape before me; a part of the neighborhood that I remember taking a few pictures of in October, and suddenly I feel so far away from those days.   I remember looking at this same stretch of street, longing to get lost, to find the portal that would trap me in a time loop where October never had to end. And yet...it ended. ...

  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...

  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...

 I went for another walk tonight. The sky was so gray and gloomy, it was absolutely perfect. These are the moments I live for, the moments I have to soak up before they're all gone. As I walked, I felt fully immersed in the October atmosphere. Once again as if I were in a movie or Halloween special. It's one of those evenings where you can just feel it.  But there is such a strange melancholy to this, the final countdown to Halloween.  October, for me, is life in its truest form. The time everyone and everything stops hiding. Decorations and costumes are more like windows to the soul. What you dress up as, how you decorate...it all feels like a reflection of what's just beyond the surface. The parts of us we hide, but wish we didn't have to.  It's strange how fleeting it is. I walk tonight, and it feels like a celebration, but also a painful goodbye.  I look around at all of the decorations I see, and know they won't be here soon. Some of them will disappear imm...

  When I was little, I often dreamed of witches. I blamed it on the abundance of witch decor I saw as a child. The nearby farm with the witch attached to the wooden orange moon. The house I trick-or-treated at every single year, that fashioned an old lamppost into a witch flying across the moon. It was all so deeply ingrained into my Halloween experience. When I got a little older, I started to believe that there was a witch out there watching over me. That she would come to me, maybe on my sixteenth birthday, like Sabrina on my favorite TV series, and whisk me away into my real life. I didn't see Halloweentown until my thirteenth Halloween had already passed, but I definitely had my suspicions after the fact that perhaps my parents had just let my powers grow dormant, or something. Clearly I was meant to be on the bus back to that town.  The older I've gotten, I've stopped searching the skies for Santa Claus, stopped imagining faeries in colorful gardens, all of that. But ...

 I keep seeing these social media posts, saying things like "This October isn't October-ing the way previous Octobers Octobered", or something along those lines. (This picture was found on a random Instagram account so I'm unsure of the artist.) To be fair, I feel like these kinds of posts pop up for every occasion. Every month, every holiday...there always has to be some mass complaint that it doesn't feel like years past. (Don't even get me started on how every single New Year's Eve post is always about how much the previous year sucked.) I understand it, sometimes...I think, in general, we are all always chasing the feelings we got from certain holidays and moments in time as children. I don't know that Christmas has felt Christmas-y to me since I turned eighteen-ish. It's hard not to feel like something is broken, when you're reaching for something that is no longer there, ripped away by the inevitable phenomenon of growing older.  However,...

 I went for a walk tonight. I don't often take walks in the dark, as the streets in my neighborhood are not really built for pedestrians casually strolling after the sun goes down. Sidewalks are minimal, brush is overgrown, there are bumps in the road... But, the October air was simply too delicious this evening to not take advantage of it. And so I set off, on a very small, deliberate journey. I find that Halloween-time hasn't changed a bit since my childhood. There are always the houses that are dark and seem almost sealed shut. My street is a strange array of the bright and the dark. A few houses from home, my path is lit nicely. Then I descend into darkness.  But then, as I pass the little bridge, actually part of a driveway, that reminds me so very much of the bridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, I am suddenly greeted by a burst of light. A voice, a memory, in the back of my head, says, triumphantly: Once you cross that bridge, my friend, the ghost is through; his power ends...

 I have said, since my childhood, that Halloween ends the most abruptly of all the holidays.  I can't really decide if it's gotten better or worse as I've gotten older.  It's great that a year-round Halloween community exists, of course, but October and Halloween-time are truly so fleeting. Perhaps the most fleeting things I can think of. The morning of November 1st comes, and decorations are being packed away, hidden again, as if no one can dare know, beyond the 31 days of October itself, that strange and spooky things are of interest to anyone; that "scary" doesn't always have to be a bad thing. And for that reason, for how fleeting it truly is, every moment of October truly feels precious. Every moment of October not spent somehow acknowledging or being immersed in it, seems wasted, criminal.  Sometimes, during the month of October, I feel like a person who's been told I only have a limited amount of time left to live. And perhaps I do...I've al...

  I went for my first walk in ages tonight.  The last real walk I remember going on, was a December morning, when Halloween was being discarded.  I remember seeing pumpkins by garbage cans, empty spaces where ghosts once flew.  The ghosts of ghosts, you might say.  The world hasn't looked the same, since then. But now, now it is autumn. It is that magical time when September shifts into almost-October; goes from being my birthday month to almost-Halloween.  I walk tonight, and I see the beginnings.  Not everyone has decorated yet, but it is starting. The world is beginning to look like a place I recognize once more, and old friends are appearing on lawns or in doorways, or peering down at me from windows.   I'm not sure if I'm waking up from a dream, or have fallen back to sleep.  But whatever it is, it feels good. The best I have felt in a long time. "Welcome back," I say to the decorations, and to autumn and Halloween, and to myself. "It fe...

  Today, we stand at the beginning of the road. The start of something we've anticipated for so long, it sometimes felt like it was never going to arrive.  Today the sky darkens in the most inviting shade of gray, bringing a breeze and a gentle flutter of leaves just starting to turn shades of yellow or red or brown.  Our memories harken us back to the place that feels like some fictional dreamworld each year, a world ablaze in color, celebrating the things that most people don't dare speak of, when it isn't time. It's almost hard to believe this is the same world we've existed in all summer long, with its endless days of blinding sunlight and green, green, green, as far as the eye can see.  Some are sad about summer's end, but we know it won't go without a fight. There will still be hot days, still moments where the light is too bright, although the summer has lasted so long already. Today we see the start of the most fleeting season. Summer clings on, leav...

  The most amazing thing happened to me, on a Saturday afternoon.  The date was August 30th, just two days before Labor Day; the start of September, and, thankfully, the unofficial (but official, in my book) end of summer.  I wound up at a local toy shop, coming away with some tiny plushies. (Two of them Christmas themed, ironically, as I am working toward finding the magic in all things once more .) As I exited the store, something caught my eye beyond the fence leading to the next residential street.  A very tall pumpkin man seemed to be walking toward a house. My mind snapped back to when I was six years old, the very first time the Great Pumpkin came to visit me. How I'd heard him in the night, a candle rattling around in his head as he did his work, ensuring the happiest of Halloweens for the truest of believers. How special it felt to know I was one of his Chosen.  I'd always hoped to thank him one day. I quietly tiptoed around the fence, out into the narr...

  I heard someone say, the other day, that we are heading into the final week of summer before Labor Day, before it's 'back to reality' . This was such a strange thing for me to hear.  The season that September will usher in, has always been the dream state for me.  'Back to reality' is a phrase I associate with coming back from a vacation, or the end of a magical event. I have never once thought of entering the fall season as the end of something. Fall is the event.  When I think of summer, I think of the mundane. The bright, generic reality that people seem to love to exist within. It's a time where everyone blends in, but I stand out, my eyes water-bleeding from the sunlight, my body exhausted and my energy zapped from the heat. It feels like being trapped in a cubicle at a 9-5 job, working hours of overtime every day.  I don't know that I can think of anything more mundane and constricting than summer. This is the escape people crave, but summer, for me,...

 It's that time of year again, boils and ghouls! Spooky season has officially arrived on the scene, and Summer Summers of Summerville is just sick about it. She and her cronies are out here acting like that ghost pillow in their local HomeGoods means the beach is now closed until Memorial Day 2026 and the sun will not be seen again until next June. Did you know Halloween decor in July actually shortens people's summers? What a phenomenon!  Obviously, this is not the case. It's still, sadly, meteorologically speaking, very much summer. But those of us who want to look ahead have as much right to do so as thought that don't wish to look ahead have every right to do a strange little thing I'll never understand called "enjoy their summer". It doesn't have to be a battle, and yet, ever year, it is.  Sometimes I think summer people dwell on autumn and Halloween more than those of us that actually live for it. If you're so focused on what other people are...