Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

  This past Saturday, I received possibly the worst type of news someone can ever receive regarding a loved one. I was notified that my cousin was shot and killed.  For the sake of the ongoing investigation, and of course the privacy of my family and those closest to her, I'm not going to name any names here. But there is so much about her I want to talk about. For the remainder of this post, I will refer to her by a name she often asked to be called in childhood, as her absolute passion in life was ballet. Her name, for the sake of this post, will be Clara.  Clara was significantly younger than me, born in 1996. She was the first of my younger cousins whose birth I truly understood and got excited about. I remember being so happy that my aunt's due date was in September. I was actually hoping that the baby and I might share a birthday, but Clara wound up being born closer to the end of the month. Still, though, we wound up having quite a bit in common. My other cousins w...

  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...

This is probably due to that one chapter in Karen’s Pumpkin Patch , the children’s book I wasn’t expecting to resonate with me even half as much as it did, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the night before Halloween. In most areas, it’s known as Mischief Night, but I’ve heard it referred to by other names too, such as Devil’s Night, Cabbage Night, and, as it is referred to in my area of northern New Jersey, Goosey Night. (Also worth noting, it’s my mother’s birthday. I asked her to trade me several times throughout my childhood, as a part of me didn’t think she “deserved” a Halloween-related birthday as the holiday meant very little to her.) I long wondered why it was called “Goosey” night. As a young child, I thought that there must be some famous goose that I knew nothing about, that had laid her eggs on a house many years ago, hence the “egging” tradition, but the true explanation seems much more simple: “Goosey” was just a term synonymous with being foolish or flighty ...

  I have never been a fan of the spring and summer months. My interest in warm weather and sunny days has waned over the course of time to the point where it is now virtually non-existant.  And yet, somehow, I feel we are, on some level, entering the “better half” of the year. Last year , I spoke about how I started calculating the halfway point to Halloween as a teenager and eventually came to know the term “Halfoween”, thanks to randomly seeing an ad for the popular TV series (which I think was also recently rebooted), iCarly. For years I tried to find ways to celebrate this milestone day, and though I was mostly alone in it for awhile, I always tried to make it feel special. As time has gone on, I’ve found ways to celebrate Halloween in some capacity literally every day of the year, but there is still is something incredibly special about Halfoween itself. The way the Halloween community has come together to embrace this day truly astounds me. I grew up thinking that it was...

 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...

 It’s time for another random review of something I didn’t expect to resonate with me! The other day I was having a nostalgia moment (something that happens a lot to me, if you couldn’t tell), and started thinking about one of my favorite book series to read when I was much, much younger. I’m sure most people, especially those who grew up in the 90s like yours ghoully, are aware of  The Babysitters Club. I’ve actually seen it go through many different incarnations in my lifetime, from the original book series, to a short-lived HBO series, to a few spinoff book series, to a movie, to the current Netflix series and graphic novels. It’s something that’s pretty universal. However, my favorite thing to come out of the BSC franchise when I was a child was actually the spinoff book series about BSC founder and president Kristy Thomas’s younger stepsister, Karen Brewer: Babysitters Little Sister. I’m not sure how popular the Little Sister series was, but in my youth, I preferred it to...