Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

  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...

 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 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 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...

  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 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...

Do I rush the seasons? Probably. Autumn has always been the only season for me. The other seasons have their moments, some more than others, but I never feel as alive as I do in September and October. I don't necessarily mean to wish time away, but I can't help but yearn for what sets my heart ablaze, whether it's the dead of winter, the start of spring, or a day those unlike myself would deem 'perfect beach weather'.  Everyone has things they love, things they surround themselves with to make the most out of life. Mine just happens to be 'seasonal'.  Even as Halloween becomes more popular within mainstream society, so many people still don't understand the desire to hold onto that feeling all year round. Sometimes, even those within the Halloween community act like it takes away from things somehow, while I know I'd be miserable if I didn't live my life the way I do. I have tried to give it up, a few different times for a few different reasons, ...

The start of autumn, to me, always feels like seeing something in real life that you've seen in a dream. I remember once, during one of my many, many dreams about trick-or-treating on a day other than October 31st, seeing a house. I think the house, in the dream, was owned by a vampire man with a yard full of bats. Sometime later, I was in another state visiting family, and, because my father was in training for a marathon at the time, he insisted we go for a walk. On that walk that night, I saw a house that greatly resembled the one from my dream. It invoked a similar emotion, and lit up a spark inside of me, of excitement and curiosity. I believe this was the first time I ever experienced that, seeing something from a dream in reality, but it certainly wasn't the last.  I don't remember all of my dreams, but the ones I do remember tend to stay with me. The imagery, the emotions, the general feeling of it.  And autumn itself is very similar.  It's no secret that I thin...

 For as long as I can remember, I’ve referred to Thanksgiving as my least favorite holiday. (Though honestly, in adulthood, I think that’s actually New Year’s; When you’re not a partier and consider the calendar your mortal enemy, what’s the point?) As a child I found it boring, especially in comparison to both Halloween and Christmas, the holidays it was jammed in between, and as an adult I find it exhausting and pointless. I don’t really even like the food all that much.  But, I can’t help but acknowledge the fact that I also cling to it a little, as autumn’s final breath. Christmas didn’t take over as quickly when I was younger as it does now. Halloween ended, and autumn slowly, more gradually, faded away into a more dismal version of itself, with grayer skies, browner leaves, and less magic. Ghosts, black cats, witches, spiders, and skeletons disappeared from lawn displays, while pumpkins and scarecrows remained. On some level they seemed almost tired…I think I thought of ...

  Thanksgiving is the day that autumn finally throws its now-brittle, bare hands up in defeat. The remaining ghosts of Halloween are pulled back into the Netherworld, as if they are guests who have overstayed their welcome. Thanksgiving is the day the pumpkins get their final chance, if they managed to survive post-Halloween. They sit at their doorsteps, knowing their days are now really numbered, and they will be discarded, or left to rot, unnoticed.  Autumn remains for another month, but it is tired now. Tired of fighting, tired of screaming and barely being heard. Thanksgiving is the day that autumn surrenders. The day that autumn whispers into the wind for one final time,  "I'm still here." Only a few of us hear it. And those few of us know that's it's not  truly  over yet.  But Thanksgiving is a day that feels like a death.  The death of autumn for another year.  There is a finality to it now, and we mourn.

  Sometimes, the coming of autumn feels like a faraway dream. One that can never be truly realized, much like falling in love with a fictional world. It feels tangible, yet not, at the same time, when the world is blanketed in snow, or scorching with the heat of summer.  You remember autumn existing, but does it? You wonder. It feels so far away, like it happened, but didn’t. Like some fuzzy dream of something that could have happened, but seems too perfect to have been real. Summer does its best to destroy any hope of that beautiful dream existing again. The stifling heat overtakes the world like an ominous shadow, draining the life out of everything. Every task feels exhausting as the sun burns through another day, burning our energy, burning our eyes. It feels like a perpetual headache; this constant persistent heaviness over your day, your life, that feels like it will never break. You think of the pumpkins from your beloved dream of autumn, and how they wilt and wither at...

  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...