Today was our annual trip to Huber’s to pick a pumpkin for this year’s jack-o’-lantern. Beautiful, fun day. A lot of road construction, though, which added over an hour to the driving. Now we get comfortable and watch some Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Rachel and I went out on our first date thirty years ago today! It’s for this reason—and all the subsequent fall family fun resulting from that day—that October has always been special for us.

We also put up our Halloween lights today

Backyard fire on this Sunday evening.

My mom gave me this roadside tchotchke last week. Looks to be from Columbus, Mississippi or Missouri, neither of which have a Lincoln connection as far as I can tell. But that’s part of the weird Americana charm, right? I have a long memory of it hanging in our garage, so I’ve hung it in mine.

As I drove by the Landmark Baptist church near our house, I decided to refresh my memory on Landmarkism. I had a copy of Trail of Blood as a teenager and toyed with the idea of using some of its arguments to make a similar genealogy of the fundamentalist Pentecostal group I was in.

I’m making persimmon pudding for an equinox meal today. There may be misappropriation of pulp going on here.

This looks like the churches I grew up in, with two differences:

1. We would not have had a baptistery. We did baptisms in a deep spot in a local creek.
2. If we would have had a baptistery, we would not have jumped into it. We would have said that brother “got in the flesh.”

Otherwise, totally us.

Another sign of the shift out of summer: we can hear the scrap yard a mile from here in the morning. Turns out, sound travels farther in cold temperatures.

One of the things I’ve learned since taking this new job is that the feeling of vague dread every time I think of work is not, in fact, necessary.