happyThere are Pumpkin Spice lattes at Starbucks and Pumpkin Pie Pop-Tarts at Target and pumpkin pancakes at the IHOP. Empty buildings are transformed into sprawling Halloween wonderlands with names like "Spirit" and "Halloween Central." Many of them used to be Borders stores. It's like changing one kind of personal church into another, more transitory, beacon of faith.
I spent the last night of September wandering lost in a vast corn maze, stopping periodically to hug the corn, to bury my face in the leaves and just breath in the sweet green smell of the autumn coming in. If one of the boutique perfume companies could make a perfume that was the exact smell of corn maze at midnight, with the dirt and the green and the ripening corn and the cool night air...I would buy twenty bottles. I would sell my entire current perfume collection if I had to, in order to buy more bottles of that perfect corn maze scent. Because it would be the scent of my soul.
For me, this really is the most wonderful time of the year. This is the time when the air smells right, when the coffee tastes right, and when it's easiest to resist the siren song of things I shouldn't be eating, because those things are everywhere.
October is like coming home.
October 5 2011, 04:07:41 UTC 5 years ago
Back in the day, when I worked at Borders, we had our own cafe and a yearly promotion of a coffee & chai flavor called "Pumpkin Spice." For some reason I was away on a visit right before this promotion was to start and came back to a morning meeting where the staff had decided that Pumpkin Spice was the missing Spice Girl and "you're going to draw her." Hu?
So my first one had, basically, a perky redhead in a witch's costume holding a pumpkin. And our sales were good. So the next year I drew a new one where her red roots were showing through black-dyed hair. And our sales were better. It wasn't anything particularly special, only that a pretty girl caught the customers' eye and gave us the chance to explain what this product was. I drew one more for the store before I moved and I've drawn one since for a recipe collection. Only the latter two are currently online.
November 18 2011, 15:41:15 UTC 5 years ago