[Note: I’ll be taking a little break from the heavy topics I’ve been discussing for the past few days (Death, Uncertainty, Questions of Faith). Don’t worry though, I will be back with more heaviosity soon enough. Thank you all for reading!]

Sometimes Mom just had enough. Typically she’d had it with Dad. Too many pictures, too many bad jokes; you get the picture. She looks exhausted.

This is pumpkin head Mom. Looks like she’d had it with me here, since I’m the one taking the picture.

I remember putting newspaper down all over the table, when it was pumpkin time. I guess Dad usually carved them, but I remember the time I tried. It was tougher than it looked. The little serrated table knife got all bendy as I tried to make a triangular pumpkin eye. I’m better at it now.

Look carefully at the three pumpkins below. I hadn’t noticed one amazing detail in this picture until relatively recently. There were three kids in our household. Mike, the oldest was autistic, profoundly retarded and nonverbal; I was the middle child and little bro was the youngest. I think unconsciously, whoever carved the middle pumpkin captured the flavor of my childhood up to that point in time. You can see me holding my pumpkin in the first picture, above. It was hard for all of us to live with Mike; he was unreachable and unpredictable and very frustrating.

The picture below is of my two siblings and me. I’m probably holding little bro’s pumpkin.