Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

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...

 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 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...

  It was the one gloomy day we really had all October. It had been unseasonably warm. So sunny. The atmosphere of Halloween, of   'spooky season', if you will, was nearly lost.  But that day was different. Good things loomed on the horizon for me. I was about to go off in celebration of my favorite holiday, in my favorite place. If I was lucky, which I was, I might complete the final leg of a particular piece of my healing journey on that trip. I don't know that I've ever been more excited. I called my mother that morning, as I took a walk around the block. Her birthday was the next day. We talked about everything, but mostly how happy I was.  It felt like magic. I came home and sat out in the yard, looking around as I always do, taking in one last glimpse of my home in October. It's always so strange to look at anything, any place, and think, ' Next time I'm here, it won't be October anymore.' I may as well say: Next time I'm here's I won...

I have probably spent a significant part of my adult life chasing the high of Christmas Eve in my childhood. Though Halloween was always my favorite holiday, Christmas Eve felt like this otherworldly time, when the whole world sat on edge, waiting for something magical to happen. And once the morning came, everything would be as it had been the year before. A homecoming. I haven’t felt that way about Christmas in a very long time, but tonight I feel that excitement once more. I see the pieces coming back together. The decorations I mourned last year reappearing, on neighbors’ lawns and doorsteps, in stores I visit. Pumpkins, real  pumpkins, are alive and waiting once more, relevant again, no longer the rotting forms left over from a night no one seems to remember. We are seen.  The world looks like a place I recognize again, and I don’t have to squint so hard to see it. I don’t look across the lake and imagine the green trees turning orange and red and yellow, because now they...

  There is an image that many of us keep in our minds, of a child waiting for Santa Claus on the evening of December 24th.  Many of us can recall being that child, jumping up hopefully at every slight little sound, thinking it may be reindeer on the roof.  These memories and images represent our belief in magic in its truest form.  And for many people, this goes away after so many years. I no longer wait to see a sleigh flying past me, but for me, magic...anticipation...is still very much a part of my life.  On the evening of September 30th I look outside. I catch sight of a leaf with a tint of orange or yellow or red. I feel a chill in the air. A strange aura of spookiness. I see pumpkins on porches and can almost sense the excitement of the people that placed them there.  The greatest gifts of my year don't come from a man on a sleigh with a sack full of items.  I wake up on the morning of October first and run into the waiting arms of the time of ye...

  Where does October go when its time has passed? Everyone has a home to retreat to when the party is over, don’t they? I’ve always thought of October like an old friend, one I don’t get to see frequently throughout the year, and one who, sadly, has a tendency to leave without saying goodbye. So many November mornings I woke up, trying to find the traces of my beloved, who’d just been there the night before. And, although certain things remained the same, the comfort of knowing that October was there was almost entirely gone, as if it never existed at all.  As the years have gone on, October’s exit has only become more abrupt, with the bully December trying to block out November, and memories of October, entirely.  But still, where does it go? I’ve spent much of my life trying to find October’s home. If it can’t come to me, all year round, then why shouldn’t I be able to go to it? I’ve found that October doesn’t retreat to one place. Maybe it’s cliche to say that it lives...

 Halloween is less than a week away. This is a truly exciting time, but I also can’t help but be sad when I think about the fact that, a week from today, Halloween will be over. Post-Halloween depression is something I’ve always struggled with. It hits me hard every year, once Halloween night’s festivities are done. Even as a young child I referred to November 1st as “the day of despair”. Clearance sales make it slightly more bearable in adulthood, but nothing really takes away the pain of knowing Halloween is gone for another year once November arrives. In recent years, though, I often catch myself falling into a pre -Halloween depression as well. There is a period of time, during late October, when looking forward to the actual day of Halloween, blends with knowing the season is just about done.  If you love Halloween, you probably know the time I’m talking about. You can’t take two steps toward a fleck of orange you see in the distance at any major retail store without trip...