Confession Tuesday

I confess I can't believe it's already Tuesday as today's holiday made it feel like a Sunday. But now that we have our dates in order, let's begin...


I confess, I ache for this time of year.

There is no other way to say that autumn is my favorite season and October with its month of creepy travel ghost shows. I love spooky and have always been intrigued with graveyards, with haunted houses. I used to play kickball in a cemetery when I was a kid. I used to have my mum drive me to the gate of an old cemetery behind The Drift On Inn after we went to the Drive-Thru Rice Pudding Hut just so I could see if I saw any shadows behind the gates.

Fall brings me to my childhood watching It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and that scene where Snoopy sneaks through the countryside to the Halloween party is probably how I ended up in the country, how I wanted to live in a place with fields and pumpkin patches. How I wanted to have a countryside I could disappear into.

To me, it's perfect this time of year, the color of the moon, the fog, the leaves falling everywhere, asters blooming, the farms and their harvests, the cornstalks, all of it. I like that we feel a little closer to the otherworld, with Halloween, and All Souls Day comes November 1st and Day of the Dead begins with its sugar skulls and marigold altars.

And even with ghosts and death, I see it as the romantic time of year with football mums and homecoming, nights at stadiums and wet wool uniforms, the sound of the crowd, hot chocolate spilling across a metal bench. Many years ago back in high school I remember running onto the field in the rain, I remember having someone to run to and the orange moon on the other side of the stadium watching over it all.

All this beauty and a feeling I can't put my finger on, a feeling that mirrors joy, contentment, and yet, last week I just wasn't quite right. A little sad. A little anxious.

This is the fall I am part of. The girl with the homecoming mum crying in the hallway. The trees losing their leaves in a sudden windstorm. The crisp air and the night blanket shutting down the sun a little earlier. All this and its beauty, over and over again.

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