Neighborhood News:
The Great Pumpkins Have Arrived!
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When I drove past this morning, this year’s giant pumpkins were being carved.
Now we are ready for Halloween! |
Reading
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| Practical Magic: a real Halloween book about witches! |
Books about witches seem to be domestic, because witches are domestic. Their cookpots may be filled with unthinkable and inedible stews, but the concoctions do steam up the domestic space in the kitchen. And often, witches cook real delicious food. The witches in
Practical Magic definitely fit this stereotype, and I loved it. From the beginning when witch Sally fixes lunches for herself and her sister, and also later when Sally and her daughters go back to visit the witching house in Massachusetts, their cooking sounds delicious and also normal:
“Sally was the one who cooked healthy dinners of meat loaf and fresh green beans and barley soup, using recipes from a copy of Joy of Cooking she’d managed to smuggle into the house. She fixed their lunchboxes each morning, packing up turkey-and-tomato sandwiches on whole-wheat bread, adding carrot sticks and iced oatmeal cookies…” (p. 6)
“They’ll fix a picnic lunch of cream cheese and olive sandwiches, pita pockets stuffed with salad, Thermoses filled with lemonade and iced tea. They’ll pack up the car the way they do every August, and get on the highway before seven, to avoid traffic.“ (p. 195)
“Vegetarian lasagna and green bean salad with almonds, and cherry cheesecake for dessert, all homemade.” (p. 198)
The two sisters escape the real witch house of their aunts, who actively practice witchcraft and do spells for women in distress (especially distressed love) — but their powers follow the sisters when they try to escape, and in the end, witching is the big thing. Meanwhile, they have insights about life and all its complexities, but can’t always solve their own problems. They are also cursed: the men they love are doomed to die. As one sister observes: “Money, love, or fury—those are the causes for most everything.” (p. 202)
Note: I haven’t seen the movie of this book, and I just read about a coming sequel to that movie. The review was lukewarm, so I probably won’t bother to see either of them.
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| Mary Burton: What She Saw |
What She Saw was a free book offered to me by amazon.com (I don’t know why). I had never heard of the book or of the author, but I did read the whole thing. It’s a suspense novel about some pretty icky murders, but the descriptions of violence aren’t excessive. The author has written many other books, but I doubt if I. will read any of them. I guess this is another good choice for Halloween reading!
Halloween Again: Walking in my Neighborhood
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This “dog” barks and jumps out of his house when you walk by on the sidewalk.
It’s very scary! |
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| Most of the blow-up decorations are boring, but this one is kind of neat. |
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| At the local produce store: pumpkins everywhere. |
Important Halloween news from the New York Times: “the price of chocolate candy has risen almost 29 percent over the start of the Halloween season last year. A recent survey by the personal finance site FinanceBuzz has prices of Halloween candy up 78 percent from five years ago.” If you have been getting ready for trick-or-treaters you already know this!
The Botanical Garden in Autumn
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| A beaver lives here. |
Photos © 2025 mae sander
