A short post on autumn

October is here. It contains so many wonderful things: Halloween. Fall colors. Cool weather. Spiced apple cider. Pumpkin pie (and pumpkin cheesecake.) My 13^th wedding anniversary.

October is the first full month of autumn in the year. September is still winding down from the heat of summer. But October...October brings with it a fuller effect of autumn. Leaves that were just barely thinking of turning colors in September begin to change with a much stronger force. Nights bring frost (in my neck of the woods, at least). Days bring cool but sunny days.

Autumn, for me, is one of my favorite seasons in the year. When I still lived in southern Idaho, spring and fall were my favorite seasons because the weather was blissfully cool compared to the scorching summers. Here on the Oregon coast, we haven't seen the kind of heat I'm used to seeing in the summer. But the cooler days and seeing the frost on windshields when I get up in the morning is still as wonderful as it always has been.

Autumn also brings harvest time for many plants. We're still getting peppers, both sweet and hot. Our tomatoes quit producing a while ago. But we still have artichokes growing, and we're getting more than I thought we would from a small handful of plants. We got some peas and green beans from our plants over the last couple months. We even got a few tiny onions and some nice carrots. The farm my husband and his partners started is beginning to, pardon the pun, bear fruit for us.

I'm loving Oregon and the lovely weather here. Autumn is getting under way and it's reflected in everything around me. I love seeing the world shift and change as the seasons turn. Each season brings with it something new. Each season tells a different story. For me, the stories of spring and autumn are my favorite. Their tales are woven with sights, scents, and sounds that evoke good memories for me.

What is your favorite season? What reminds you most of it?

Why I love Halloween

Everyone and their cousin is doing a post about Halloween. I thought about doing one too, but there's something more important than horror films, haunted houses, and trick or treating that happens on the 31^st for me.

It's my twelfth wedding anniversary.

Himself and I have been together for fifteen years, married for twelve. Twelve years ago, we got dressed up in nice clothes (I bought a beige lace dress that I wore for several years after) and went to the courthouse. We had a couple friends and my family there. We said our vows, kissed, and that was that. We were married.

I've been asked how we met. It's a funny story, at least to us. I think I've shared this before, but I don't remember. So I'm sharing it again.

I was twenty two with no job prospects, no college education, and no marketable skills outside working in a nursing home or fast food/retail. Not what you want when you're that age. One of my older sisters suggested I try Job Corps. I was under the cut off age by two years and I could learn more about office work by taking their clerical program. So I went to the office and signed up. My only request? To get me out of Idaho. I was also going through some problems in my personal life and I needed to get away from everyone.

There was some discussion, but they finally found me one in Sedro-Woolley, WA that had an open spot in the clerical program. So, a few days after I got the call, my parents and one of my friends saw me off at the Greyhound station. Job Corps paid for my bus ticket. I don't remember how long the bus ride was, but I know we got into the actual Job Corps center just after midnight. I was exhausted and only half paid attention to what was being said around me. Which was fine, because it all got repeated in Orientation anyhow.

Our first introduction to life in Job Corps was an Orientation class that was to last for two weeks. Now, there was a lot of free time on the center. It's all job training during regular business hours. But that left us with our evenings free. I went looking for something to do. I found a group playing D&D (2^nd edition) and they let me come in to play.

It had been ten years since I played D&D. I'd been playing Arduin for most of my teenage and adult life. So I needed someone to help me build my character. Enter Himself. He was eighteen years old and supremely confident in his knowledge. So he helped me build my character. He was an arrogant asshole who gave me crap because he thought I should know more than I did. I decided I didn't like him and since he wasn't a regular with the group, I didn't see much of him beyond him helping me with my character building.

Well, near the end of the two weeks of Orientation, the culinary arts students came in to talk about the banquet they were throwing for us. It was a test for them and a way for us to see one of the trades in action. Guess who was the coordinator for our banquet? Yup, you guessed it. It was Himself.

I was surprised by his professionalism and the fact that he seemed to genuinely care about getting things correct for all of us. There were two vegetarians, one who didn't drink soda, and me who couldn't have caffeine at the time because of the meds I was on. He made notes of that and said things would be ready for us.

We had our banquet and the culinary students did exactly what we hoped they would. At the end of the banquet, Himself and his team of culinary students came in to clean up. I did something I still don't know why I did it: I gave Himself a hug and thanked him for the banquet. He was shocked. I was shocked. And my friend started laughing.

We headed back to the Orientation classroom where we hung out until it was time for the rest of the center to go to lunch. We were allowed to wander around and hang out with people. Well, I found Himself in a gazebo smoking. I stopped and gave him another hug, much to the amusement of my friend since I'd told her I found him to be an asshole. Then he asked me if I was seeing anyone. I told him no. He asked me on a date. I said yes.

That yes was the beginning of a relationship that has had it's up and downs. We've had fights. We've gone through some pretty hard times. But we're still together. And that's what makes Halloween so special to me. My husband.

Haunted Halloween

In 1999, I enrolled in Job Corps. I needed some extra training in my chosen field and couldn't afford college. I also needed to get out of town and away from everyone. So I put in for an out of state Job Corps center. I was sent to Cascades Job Corps Center in Sedro-Woolley, WA. Little did I know what I was getting into.

I didn't know it at the time, but Cascades Job Corps Center used to be a mental hospital - Northern State Hospital, to be precise. There were, when I attended, four dorms. When I first arrived two were co-ed and two were males only. Later one of the males only went to co-ed and I moved into it. Not everyone was happy with having people aged 16-24 running around the old mental hospital and they weren't afraid to let us know.

The clearest memory I have of the night I arrived - we were picked up at the bus station at some point close to midnight - was when I got there how oppressive it felt. It was in June but there was a definite chill to the air that I don't believe had anything to do with the weather. The dorms were dimly lit because everyone was in bed. I remember going into the New Input Bay and shivering as I got into bed. There was something there and it wasn't sure if it liked me.

Over the next few days, I found out about the center's history. At first, I blew off the descriptions of the ghosts and weird occurrences as overactive imaginations. Then I had my first encounter with a ghost and that changed my perspective very quickly.

I had just gotten out of the New Input Bay and was in a room with two other girls. Both were nice enough, though it was very obvious English was not their first language. That didn't stop us from becoming friends. One thing Isabel would insist upon though was that the door had to be left open a crack at night. We weren't supposed to do that but she wouldn't go to sleep unless the door was open a crack. It took some effort to get the door open a crack and to keep it that way because the RAs would come close it. But we still tried. Isabel said something bad was in the room and the light from the hallway kept it out.

One night, after the RAs closed the door on us again, I woke up. I noticed the darkness and decided I'd get up to open the door again. As I started climbing out of my bunk bed, I saw her. She was standing in the middle of the floor. Pale hair, pale nightgown, and holding something in her hand. She was a pale blur to me at that moment. I pulled my glasses on and I got a better look at her. It was a little girl, perhaps 6 or 7 years old, holding a red ball. She looked at me for a moment and then vanished. I sat there in the darkness shivering for a few minutes and then I went and opened the door a crack.

The next morning I asked Isabel about the evil thing that she didn't like. She told me it was a voice she heard when she stayed up late studying. Isabel was in college and was often up later than Martha and me. She said it was a man's voice yelling something. It frightened her and she didn't like being alone in the dark because of it. I told her about the little girl. She told me she'd seen her too and that the little girl was nothing to be frightened of.

I encountered the little girl several times over my 7 months at that Job Corps center. Sometimes she'd just be standing there, staring. Other times she'd be bouncing her ball. I never heard her speak but she was always around. She existed only in my dorm. None of the others I talked to from the other three dorms had seen her, though they had their fair share of ghost tales from their own dorms.

I also encountered the angry man with Isabel. I was up late with her one night. She was studying, I was reading. Martha was gone for the weekend. Isabel and I had been talking until she went back to work on her paper and I went back to my book. All of a sudden, I heard a voice. It wasn't any voice I recognized and by this point I knew all of the RAs. I looked up and Isabel was white and shaking. She kept muttering something in Spanish over and over again but I couldn't understand her, my knowledge of Spanish having dwindled to barely anything over the years since high school. I listened to the man's voice. It was getting louder and closer. I couldn't understand what he was saying but it was obvious he was upset about something.

Isabel got up and quietly closed the door. She turned on every light in the room and sat down, her rosary in her hands. She whispered what could only be prayers as the man's voice grew louder and louder. Our door rattled, as if someone were trying to get in, and then the rattling stopped and the voice faded away as if the speaker were walking away from us. I looked over at Isabel and asked her if that was the evil thing. She nodded, still clutching her rosary.

I saw other ghosts, in the abandoned buildings students weren't allowed to enter that stood behind the dorms. I saw pale figures in the broken windows and heard the voices on a quiet night. I knew the story about the nurse who haunted the old nurses' quarters where she'd hung herself, and the ghosts of those who'd been lobotomized. I heard the stories of Frank, a male ghost that caused mischief in one of the other dorms. He would turn on the showers when no one was there. He'd appear in the mirror standing right behind someone. He'd mutter and move about at night. He'd turn the lights on and off.

I never encountered him, or the ghost in the other co-ed dorm who would open the doors to the college students' doors. Or the nurse that would come talk to you to soothe you when you were sick. There were so many restless spirits there. I came to find out later that there were over 100 unmarked graves back behind the rec center, and it is my belief that many of those poor souls still walk the grounds of their former prison to this day.

10 years strong - and stronger

Today is Halloween, but this isn't going to be the typical trick or treat post.

No, I want to tell you about something that I'm proud of.

On this day, ten years ago, at 8:30 in the morning, I went to the Ada County Courthouse and was married to a man that most people thought I'd never make it five years with. We'd already been together for three years, with about 4 months off for a major break up during our engagement, but that didn't matter. Our marriage wasn't going to make it to five years. We'd be divorced after a year, maybe two.

Yeah, we proved those naysayers wrong.

We were almost divorced at nine years. Some of you may remember my posts from around this time last year bemoaning the fact that Himself was contemplating asking me for a divorce. I'm happy to say we got past that and are now a much stronger couple for it.

That's actually what I wanted to talk to you about today...getting stronger. I am a much stronger woman than I was ten years ago. My husband is a much stronger man than he was ten years ago. I don't mean physically. I mean emotionally. We've literally been through hell in the last three years. Last year was almost hell number 3 (let's not talk about hell numbers 1 & 2...those happened within the same year, within a few months of each other, and almost killed us). But each time something has happened that made us come out stronger together rather than break apart.

Part of it is our personalities. I'd rather die than get a divorce. I don't believe in divorce, though I know it happens and it could have just as easily happened to me. At this point in my life, I can say I won't be the one to initiate a divorce ever. In the future, who knows. I can only say how I feel now. He gets angry and last year he was very angry and very hurt (not necessarily because of me...family issues). I got the brunt of it last year because I was a convenient target and the real person he wanted to hurt was out of reach. He realized this and we worked past the broken trust issue with the divorce threat and moved on.

We're stronger for that too.

Every event in our ten years has given us some new personal strengths, as well as strengthening us as a couple. Everyone told us again as we faced down our first hell three years ago that we should divorce. That it was all my fault (his side of the family) that it happened, that he was worthless (my side of the family), and that we'd lose everything if we stayed together. We were going to lose everything anyway regardless if we stayed together or not. We chose to stay together so we didn't have to face it alone.

I love my husband. We have our spats. We get on each other's nerves. We sometimes hurt each other badly enough to make someone (me) cry. But we get past it, we get through it, and we move on a little stronger and a little better. That's one of the secrets to why our marriage has lasted so long...our ability to turn our weaknesses into our strengths and to help each other push past the bad and grow stronger.

The best thing in my life

The best thing in my life isn't exactly a thing.  He's a person.  In fact, he's my husband.

My husband and I have been together for 11 years and married (as of this coming Sunday...you know, Halloween?) for 8.  I love him more today than I did when we first got married - and I loved my husband a lot even then.  We've been through hell together and come out burned, battered, and broken.  But we're still together, which is something that I thought wouldn't be the case.

I met my husband when the two of us were attending Job Corps in WA.  He was in Culinary Arts and I was in Clerical.  To be perfectly honest, I thought he was an asshole when we first met.  He was condescending and more than a bit full of himself.  He was also 18 and I was 22.  He was too young for me, or so I thought.

I didn't want anything to do with him so I avoided him if possible.  I played D&D and he was there.  But Job Corps was a large enough group of people that I was able to avoid him for the most part.  Then he got put in charge of the Orientation end banquet.  He was in and out of my Orientation class, getting our allergies/preferences/etc.  He was actually really nice.  I found myself beginning to soften towards him.

One of the guys in my Orientation class tried to get me to agree to go out and I shot him down on the morning of the banquet.  When we got to the banquet, everything was awesome.  My husband and his friends served everyone cheerfully, and cracked jokes to make us smile.

I'm a rather anti-social person when it comes to face to face interactions.  I'm a lot better now, but eleven years ago I was still very much against being part of a crowd.  So my friend Rachel and I waited for everyone else to file out after the banquet.  The culinary students were all in there, cleaning up and making jokes.  Then me...the most anti-social person there...I walked up to my husband (who I really didn't like, remember) and gave him a hug.  We were both kind of shocked.  I mumbled some kind of thanks and scampered out after Rachel.

The banquet ended right around the beginning of the regular lunch hour, so we had a lot of time to kill.  Rachel wandered off to do something while I took a walk around the grounds.  When I came back around, I saw him standing in the gazebo smoking with the rest of the culinary students.  I walked up and gave him another hug, thanking him again.  We chatted for a minute, and then he asked me if I was seeing someone.  I was depressingly single at the time, and had been even before I went to Job Corps.  So I told him no.  Then he asked me if I'd like to go out some time.  I said, "Sure!"  I said it in such a bubbly, cheerful, high pitched voice that I cracked a few people up.  We agreed to meet after trade (the time you were in classes or doing the on the job style training we did) for dinner and to talk about our plans.

Eleven years later, I'm still with him.  We hit a rough patch where we broke up for about 4 months.  During that 4 months I finished figuring out my life and who I thought I wanted to be.  He did the same thing.  Then he came to Idaho to live with me in January of 2002.  If you've never ridden a bus through the mountains between Washington and Idaho in the middle of winter.....don't.  It's NOT an adventure I'd like to repeat again and he feels the same.  But he got here, we got things worked out, and we got married on October 31, 2002.

He is my love and my lover.  He is my other half, my cheerleader, and my best friend.  Without him I wouldn't be who I am today because he has helped shape me.  As I have helped shape him into the man he is.  And we continue to shape each other.  We are partners and companions for each other.  We are complete opposites, and a recent study shows that opposites don't really attract for stable relationships.  Well, we have our fights - all couples do - but we're a living contradiction to that study.  In our case, opposites really do attract and we love being so different from each other.  It makes for interesting days and fun conversations.