Ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties...

...and things that go bump in the night! It's that time of year. Pumpkins everywhere, our neighbors' black cats on the prowl, skeletons dangling from porches... and the Christmas displays going up in the big-box stores. I, along with apparently everyone else, detest the earlier and earlier start to the annual force-feeding of consumerism that has become Christmas. Somebody's got to be buying the stuff, though, nurturing the greed that perpetuates the earlier and earlier force-feeding... 

But enough of that. Happily, we're relatively immune to it in our little community. We're immersed in things autumnal -- Hallowe'en, Dia de los Muertos, sunny beaches after the summer fog...

.. and of course the Brussels sprout harvest. The sprouts grow along the plant's stem, the bulging little balls poking out all the way down almost to the ground.

The sprout fields are a sea of fluffy leaves, stretching across our fertile bench of land between mountain and ocean.

 To harvest the sprouts, the farmers strip the leaves away, then cut the stems and strip the sprouts off.

A new trend is to sell the whole sprout stalk. That can be a lot of sprouts.

You know how sprouts smell when they're cooking, kind of... pungent? Well, they smell a little that way when they're growing, too. When we were kids passing a sprout field, the cool joke in the car was "who farted?!"



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A few days ago I looked through my collection of New Yorker covers (yes, this proud native Californian has taken the New Yorker since the '70s) and found a couple of classic Hallowe'en covers by the inimitable Charles Addams.

This one appeared on the October 31, 1988 cover... a month after Charles Addams' passing on September 29, 1988. I think he must have loved that.