© Celine Sparks, 2023
We’ve been pretending the autumn equinox has already happened for three weeks. But there’s just something about drinking hot spiced cider in near 90-degree temperatures that makes us second-guess howling at the moon this early. I’m so ready for it to drop down to a chilly 75, and for the leaves to start blushing. I don’t know why the leaves blush; it’s the tree that gets naked.
But I’m ready, and it’s not just because I like football and the fair, but it’s my best time for decorating. All the other seasons I try to compete with the festive Martha Stewarts in my world, and the scoreboard looks very much like the one where the Alabama Crimson Tide is playing the nursing home (and btw, that score is getting closer all the time).
I try, but at Easter, I’m way better at putting on egg-shaped chocolate pounds than I am at pulling off flowery foyers. On Valentine's Day, my construction paper cut-outs look like someone’s already had heart surgery. And I even have struggles at Christmas, my number one love of this lifetime, not even edged out by Free Pancake Day, I mean, we make a candy house each year – all six of us, plus friends and spouses. We always excused the way it looked when the kids were little. They did their best, and the sentimental value of the effort meant more to us than the fact that there were tracks down the roof where the icing was licked, and where the heavy peppermints slid down the steep incline and landed on the gumdrop tree shaped like a hernia. But the kids are all grown up now, and it doesn’t look much better. I can’t think of a good excuse for the way these houses look now, except we can claim to be Picasso fans.
But fall! Fall is here, and fall I can do. Dead leaves? I’ve got this! Cobwebs? Spiderwebs? I started decorating early. I can do cakes that look like they’ve been gnawed on by rats, and other foods that taste like poison. Fall is my superpower. I can throw random gourds and squash around, and act like I planned a fall scene. Hurray! It’s time to pretend rust orange and hues of brown are pretty again.
I’m also better at Macabre games like Guess Who’s Dead than I am at Christmas games where the only gift you can find that you want to steal is the one you brought.
A few falls ago, I was taking care of my dad on Halloween. The deal was, the girls had been taking turns staying with him, and apparently everyone whose turn it was, thought to bring a huge package of toilet paper as a safety measure, in case they ran out. But when I opened the top cabinet in the bathroom, Dad already had enough for a three-year snow-in without help from outsiders.
The same plot was happening in another room of his house, the kitchen, but with eggs. Apparently every sibling had been to a BOGO egg sale. Not only that, but somebody at church must’ve had a very productive hen house.
When you have this surplus, and it’s Halloween, there’s only one thought that’s bound to pop in your mind. “So Dad,” I said – he was 92 –, “Do you want to go roll some yards and egg some houses?”
I think we were both tempted, but three things prevented him from agreeing. One: I think he had warned me I would get a whipping if I participated in this about 35 years ago, and he hardly had the stamina to chase me around the house with a flyswatter now. Two: He was notoriously cheap. He used to save soap shards when we had all but used up the bar, and then when he had stored up enough of them, he would shape them into a cake and fuse them back together in the oven, resulting in something that looked like a biscuit that developed mold in several colors. And we were supposed to bathe with that! Dad was recycling before recycling was cool. And I didn’t want him to start it with toilet paper.
Yeah, he was far too cheap to throw good, unused toilet paper at a tree that wouldn’t give it back. It was a precious commodity. Okay, bad word choice I know. And three: We moved too slow at this point. We would surely get caught, especially with the walker making all that noise.
Which brings me to an event several years back. I thought I heard my neighbors in my yard late on Saturday. Their siblings had come into town to visit. They were all in their late sixties and seventies. The next morning, my suspicions were confirmed. My yard had been rolled. There was a lone Dollar General bag hanging from a limb with a roll of toilet paper, and a do-it-yourself note.
They thought they were just having a night of rowdy fun. But really, they were saving a world crisis at midnight a few weeks later, when someone in this house yelled six terrifying words.
“Are we out of toilet paper?”
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