Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

  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...

  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...

  I don't think I ever understood the world's obsession with spring. Perhaps it's because I've always found new beginnings ominous, as opposed to exciting. You could say I'm averse to change. But then, autumn is a time of change as well, isn't it? Regardless of the reason, I never understood what is so exciting about baking sun and bright skies. Or how the flowers, in shades of pink, purple, yellow...or the green grass and leaves, for that matter, were supposedly more beautiful, more inviting, than the explosions of different shades of orange against a spooky gray sky.  Most people want to fast forward to this time of year, but I wish I could fast-forward through it. Spring and summer...what is so lovely to the rest of the world, is a time of physical and mental exhaustion for me. It's a strange thing, when I really think about it. The countdown to Halloween is longest in the winter months, as the clock resets. We cling to the memories of last Halloween, so ...

 For those who celebrate such things, today is, on the Gregorian calendar, Easter Sunday. The Halloween community doesn’t seem to have a specific name for this holiday, as it does for “Creepmas”, or “Valloween”, but I have a tendency to refer to it as “Creepster”. I was thinking about it earlier today, though, and I realized…there are actually quite a few things about Easter that qualify it as “creepy”.  For one thing, I suppose I’ll get the semi-controversial stuff out of the way first. I’m really not religious, and never really have been. My mother is, to an extent. It doesn’t consume her but she finds it a comfort, and so I made traditional Christian sacraments like communion, confession, etc., and attended CCD classes until I was in middle school. It was interesting to me as I’ve always enjoyed learning, but many parts of the stories actually scared me. I’ve never read the Bible cover to cover or anything like that, but just of what I know of the religion I was taught as a...

 I recently remembered an assignment I was given when I was a sophomore in high school. Spring was coming, and our biology teacher wanted us to make some sort of journal, observing trees and plants in our yards and how they changed as spring began. I don’t remember a whole lot about this assignment, but I remember focusing on a lilac bush that my father had planted years before, and having to dry and press a piece of it into the little binder I was using for the project, but the thing that stands out the most in my memory was that the final piece of the journal was supposed to be some sort of essay about what we learned about the seasons changing and how the coming of spring made us feel. (I still think this assignment would’ve been better suited to a language arts class, but what do I know?)  I was always better at writing than I was at things like math and science, but I found this particular assignment difficult. I have never been a fan of warm, sunny weather, and the comin...