New Season

Day 16

Day One

About 16-days old, each day new insults, but it hasn't collapsed

Some pictures of our Jack-o-Lanterns, which really need to be composted, but have battery-powered candles in them that need to be removed first...and who really wants to do that tasks with the aggressive mold taking over?  I suppose we could pick them up and turn them upside down...another day.

A few days old, drying out from heat in house

The house did a pumpkin-patch outing, on a late Sunday afternoon, before the flooding, but muddy just the same.  We arrived late, shortly before the patch closed for the day.  Somehow arriving in a window without rain, the fields full of mud and standing water, the mists wending through the nearby stands of trees, the trees bright orange and yellow, bright spots on a gloomy afternoon.

We ate pumpkin and apple-cider donuts, then traipsed down to the muddiest bottom of the fields, to look at the biggest pumpkins.  All of us sinking into the mud, pumpkins rotting in the field, as we tried to wrest other pumpkins from the vines.  And then one of the housemates met us with a wheelbarrow to lug the chosen squash out of the mud patch and up the hill to the pay window.  Moving through as if in quicksand, sinking down with every step.  Scrubbed the mud off, then packed our mud-covered selves into the car again to go home.  As soon as we started driving, the rain came down in sheets again.

Our shoes remain in the mud room, caked in mud.

We carved them the following night, one of the other housemates documenting the process for his anthropology class, as some local seasonal rite he'd never experienced before.

On Halloween we sat in the living room hoping for trick-or-treaters, but only got a handful brave enough to come to our house.  Still, it's been nice to have a social household again.