HarvestFiend

Photo KWD There is still a child in every one of us who is still a trick-or-treater looking for a brightly-lit front porch.  -Robert Brault    

 The pitter-patter of sneakers on the sidewalk from house to house. Cries of delight to all that this house was the place to get the goods. Echoed by a Happy Halloween in the crisp night air. A time when children converged onto neighborhoods asking for candies.  The neighborhood that I grew up in as a youngster still has kids every Halloween coming to the doors. With trunk or treating and other carbon copies, it feels as though this tradition is dying, at least from the standpoint of a kid that grew up in the 90s and early 00s (Yes I am sure that there are still communities that do this, so I am not saying it is completely dead.)  When all month long kids can don a costume and go to a trunk or treat, or walk downtown to businesses and get candy, or a some what carnival event three weeks before (just another way to advertise for a business). The options are endless throughout October.  I remember Harvest carnivals put on by elementary schools the weekend before Halloween or in the middl

  Halloween is one of the strangest holidays or at least what it has become is something outside of the practical observation of our other traditional holidays. The most practical being independence day and new years day where we celebrate events, the independence of our nation and the dawn of a new year. Even thanksgiving and Christmas which have evolved from the events they celebrate, the pilgrims connecting with native Americans in thanks and the birth of Christ, have a sensical nature to them. Halloween is a thing of its own. A bohemian celebration of death, magic, and monsters mired in a creative anarchy full of color, gore, and fun. Like any Holiday though it is different for everyone.  Growing up for me Halloween was predominantly about two things, Candy and Costumes. Costumes were a mix of what your mom could dig up in the house to resemble something and what you could create out of the other stuff. Not a lot of Gore or scary stuff that was those other kids. We were pirates, ho

Ah, Halloween. That blessed time of the year where talking to strangers was approved and accepting their candy was applauded. It was also the one time of year where said candy was the price I could afford. Free. Growing up, my parents frowned on the unnecessary expenditure of money. Those vital green bills that are tirelessly worked for are for saving, not spending, and most definitely not for spending upon sugar. I can count on one hand the number of times I purchased candy throughout my entire childhood. And so, with this brief understanding of my upbringing, you can see why Halloween was such an exalted holiday in my home. My siblings and I would trick-or-treat for hours with unabashed enthusiasm. We were the first ones out in the neighborhoods that swarmed with energetic youngsters and the last to retire, always with bags overflowing with the stuff of life, sugar. Plans were made weeks, even months, in advance as to which neighborhoods were the most lucrative. It was all fine and w

fu·ner·al /ˈfyo͞on(ə)rəl/ the ceremonies honoring a dead person, typically involving burial or cremation. In the last fourteen months, my family and extended family have lost six family members ranging from grandmothers to uncles. All too natural causes and nothing more. In a world where global pandemics are at the forefront of the human mind, it’s hard to grasp that we all still leave this world another way.  In July, I attended my wife’s grandmother’s funeral. She died a year after my grandmother died, almost to the day. It was here, listening to the stories about her, I realized that one never truly dies or forgotten. Only when the stories stop being told then does that individual fade into death.  At our local cemetery, there are headstones made from sandstone, all etchings to show whose burial plot it is has been eroded. (Because of the watering of the grounds for that green living look cemeteries crave.) Are the stories being told of this individual or has the family forgotten th