Halloween

Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble! 

Now is the time for caramel apples, pumpkin spice, yellow leaves and graveyards. Now is the time for the supernatural things to come out and play! This is where I’m supposed to say that I love Halloween and everything about it. But then I would be lying. I do like Halloween, but only certain aspects of it. When I was younger I loved dressing up and going out into the cold with my siblings to go Trick or Treating and then coming back to dump our treats on the living room floor to count and barter with each other before going to bed. I loved drawing pictures of all things spooky and scary. I loved carving pumpkins and getting all messy from the stringy goop in the pumpkins and then later eating the pumpkin seeds mom roasted. I loved putting the candles in them and then setting them out on the front porch to watch them glow. But I hated being scared. Sometimes we would turn off all the lights and read ghost stories by candle light. Which, now that I’m older I can enjoy it more, but when I was young I hated it. My brother made scary movies which we were all apart of, but I usually could never go anywhere alone afterwards. I never liked the gory aspect of Halloween either so I will not dwell on it. Instead I will think of the spooky charm Halloween has on us all. The Jack-o-lanterns, the old movies, the candy, the costumes, the apples, the time of year when we are allowed to let out another side of us that is rarely shown, and just have fun with it! Happy Halloween!

Autumn

My goodness I have been slacking! I guess it all comes from trying to juggle all sorts of other things at once. Word of advice, tackle all your tasks one at a time. I’m 21 and I’m still learning how to do that. But enough about that; what I want to talk about is my favorite season of the year. Autumn.

Autumn is the best season there is because the hot summer rush to have vacations and fun is slowing down, the days are getting colder and everyone is ready to hunker down and ride out the rest of the year. The cold is something that I enjoy immensely. I love how brisk and sweet it is after the muggy hotness of summer. But it isn’t too cold either; it doesn’t have the harsh biting cold  of winter that practically attacks your face when it’s windy. Another thing is the changing leaves. The red, orange, and yellow leaves have always had a romance about them and a beauty that makes my heart leap. It is the time of the last harvest, when in the old days, they would celebrate with a festival where they would eat and dance before the winter came and they hardly saw one another until spring. I love watching the animals prepare for winter up in the mountains. They run about in a last ditch effort to get everything ready before they must hibernate and they can live in a nice warm hole or nest. The winter birds appear, hailing us, wishing us a good day and asking us if we are ready for the cold months. Perhaps it is because I love to get cozy on the couch with a mug of coco in my hand, in the living room next to the fire that I love autumn so much. It is a time of settling down. Spring, the season of new life has passed her baton on to summer, the season of maturity, now passes it to autumn, the season in which the earth has decided that it is done working, and now settles down for a long period of time; until spring awakens it from it’s sleep.

First Day of School

I don’t know about anyone else, but I always loved the first day of school. I loved gathering all my new books and pencils, making a list of goals to have accomplished by the end of the year, and anticipating looking back and seeing how far I have come. Don’t you just love the thrill of a brand new start, moving forward to better yourself in mind and body? The anticipation of being the best student possible and by the end of the year being miles ahead of your past self. Being excited to work towards something that matters. That is what is beautiful about the first day of school; you get to be excited about life before you have to hunker down and remember how hard it is. If only we could be as excited about school throughout the rest of the school year as well as on the first day.