On morning walks, I’ve been watching a yard down the street where a graveyard is slowly blooming from the lawn. Each day, or so it seems, a new novelty tombstone has sprouted from the grass, part of a growing tableau that also includes plastic skeletons that offer me gruesome smiles.
Halloween decorations this ambitious take time, and my neighbors have been adding to their display when they find spare moments. A few days ago, I spotted an open box in their carport with more grisly supplies for their work in progress. A bony white toe spilled from the edge of the cardboard container, and a slender skeletal finger beckoned from the far corner.
The dome of a skull gleamed from within.
For a man of a certain age, such morbid theater should be sobering, but I chuckle each time I stroll past the makeshift cemetery that appears each October a stone’s throw from my house. That’s the sly paradox of Halloween, I suppose. In winking at death, it sharpens our joy at the simple fact of being alive.
Within my own yard, the season has brought gentler tidings of mortality.
Our trees, increasingly bare, tell me that legions of leaves are dying as the year does. The annual leaf drop used to frustrate my ambitions for a perfectly manicured lawn, but my late neighbor, Zelda Long, taught me to change my priorities. Zelda had faced a few challenges that deepened her sense of what’s really important, and she urged me to stop fretting about fallen leaves.
She’s been gone a dozen years now, but I think of her each autumn when the leaves fall and I embrace the change instead of fighting it.
I’m looking now beyond our dining room window, where a fresh carpet of leaves dropped from our river birch and Drake elm overnight. I’m always surprised to discover each morning how much mysterious work has unfolded outside while I slept, the flight of leaves and owls as silent as snowfall in the darkness.
Over coffee on the patio after sunrise, my wife and I sometimes see the leaves drop in real time — a little blizzard of brown, orange and red as squirrels scurry on the branches and shake things loose.
The squirrel mind, I’ve found, dwells on insurrection, always hatching schemes of theft and assault. I just heard one as I write this, its insistent scratch amplified by the roof gutter where it’s trying to build a nest. I’m back at my keyboard after I tapped the eaves with a broomstick.
My assailant just staged a clever retreat, though I’m sure the little gremlin will return.
Such is the news from the front lines of fall in suburban Louisiana. Zelda would tell me not to sweat the small things and enjoy the turning of the year — something I’m trying to do as the days shorten and the calendar drops its final leaves.
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