Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

  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,...

  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...