10 Fall Stories About a Neighbor’s Leaf Pile, a Rescued Pumpkin, and the Traditions That Ease Loneliness

My daughter spent 3 months gardening by our fence, growing a pumpkin for her very first jack-o’-lantern. Yesterday afternoon, the pumpkin suddenly vanished. Devastated, she broke into tears.
I rushed to check our security camera, and the footage revealed one of our elderly neighbors, Mr. Halloran, carrying the pumpkin across the yard.
When I confronted him, he apologized. He showed me the pumpkin in his garage: a hard frost was forecast for that night. He knew if it stayed outside, it would freeze and rot before Halloween. It was already too late to inform us.
He admitted with a soft smile that he’d been watching her care for it all summer. His late wife loved gardening and used to grow pumpkins before she passed, and watching my daughter work in the dirt had brought life and joy back to his lonely autumns. He just couldn’t bear to see her hard work ruined by the cold weather.
Instead of taking it home, my daughter asked if we could leave it in his garage until Halloween. Over the next few weeks, she stopped by his house every afternoon after school to check on it and chat with him.
On Halloween night, they lit the jack-o’-lantern together on his front porch.

At the corn maze, a male worker kept showing up at random turns my 6-year-old and I took. After the fourth time, I got uncomfortable and started steering us toward the exit.
At the gate, I told the manager. She glanced at my son’s wristband and said, “You have the blue one.” Buried in the fine print of the entry form was a box: “First time in a maze? We’ll keep an eye out.” I’d ticked it without reading.
They give first-timers a shadow, so if we panic in the corn, someone’s already close.
I’d spent twenty minutes running from the one man in that maze whose entire job was making sure we never got lost.

When my dad was young, he got very sick one autumn and ended up spending weeks recovering in the hospital. For a long time, he wasn’t allowed to eat solid food.
By the time the doctors finally told him he could eat normally again, his father was so relieved that he made him a promise: he could ask for anything he wanted. Steak, pizza, a huge burger, his favorite dessert. No matter how expensive it was or how far he had to go to find it, my grandfather would get it.
My dad thought for a moment and said, “Tic Tacs.”
He had seen a commercial for them while lying in his hospital bed, and for some reason, after weeks of bland meals and restrictions, that tiny box of mints was all he could think about.
So my grandfather went out into the chilly fall evening and searched store after store, buying every flavor of Tic Tacs he could find. He came back carrying far more little boxes than anyone reasonably needed.
My dad never forgot it.
Over the years, the story turned into a family tradition. Whenever autumn arrives, someone usually buys a few boxes of Tic Tacs and leaves them in a candy bowl, slips them into a care package, or hands them to a relative who is having a difficult time.
I’ll admit, it’s a strange fall tradition. My friends’ families bake pies and make apple butter. Mine passes around breath mints. But every time I see one of those little plastic boxes, I think of my grandfather driving from store to store in the cold, just to make his sick kid smile.

Last year, I offered to bag our neighbor Walt’s leaves when I did mine. He’s 80. He said, “No, leave them.” He raked his whole yard into one big pile by the sidewalk and just let the pile sit there.
Next day, around 4 p.m., I heard shrieking outside. The school bus had stopped at the corner, and half a dozen kids were running straight for Walt’s pile, diving in and throwing leaves at each other. Walt sat on his porch with a cup of coffee, watching.
That weekend I asked him about it. He told me his wife used to rake a pile every fall for their three boys, and after she passed, he kept doing it. “The boys are grown,” he said. “But somebody’s kids still show up, and those few noisy minutes keep the loneliness away.”
This year I raked my leaves and carried them over to his pile.

At the orchard, the guy at the register charged me $13 for a half-peck bag. The family ahead of me paid for the exact same bag with a folded piece of paper. I thought they had some coupon I didn’t know about. I was annoyed and asked if there was a discount. He said, “Kind of.”
The paper was a drawing. Their daughter draws the orchard every fall, and they trade it for apples.

There’s a light switch in our house that doesn’t seem to do anything.
One fall evening, when the sun had started setting early, kids started to complain about how cold and dark it was getting. My husband jokingly said that the switch was there for the days when autumn started turning into winter, and everyone missed summer. According to him, flipping it sent a little extra warmth somewhere into the world. It might give someone one more sunny afternoon, help a stubborn flower hang on a little longer, or remind summer that we were still waiting for it to come back.
Then he added, “Maybe somewhere in the world, there’s a house with a switch that can send us a little happiness when we need it, too.”
The kids knew, eventually, that he was making it up. That didn’t stop us from using it. Now, every year when the evenings start getting darker, someone will flip that useless switch and say something like, “Sending a little summer.”
Sometimes it happens after a long rainy day. Sometimes when the first frost shows up. Sometimes just because everyone is tired of putting on coats.
The switch still doesn’t control a single thing in the house. But somehow it became one of our favorite fall traditions.
It’s a tiny, silly way of admitting that colder seasons can be beautiful and still make you miss warmth.

A few years ago, I worked a job where I had to work on Thanksgiving. I had a shift from 8 am to 11 pm so I only got home around midnight. I was pretty disappointed to be missing time with my family, but I didn’t really have a choice.
The first year I walked through the door, my family had waited till I got home to start the meal. It became a tradition for a few years to have “Midnight Thanksgiving.”

Hubby taking me on our annual fall drive. He is a truck driver, so he drives all over, and he maps out new places to drive me around each year to see beautiful fall leaves and scenery. He puts so much thought into these drives, and I love it!

During the fall, my friends and I will get together on the weekends, pick apples, go shopping, go to the farmer’s market, and do fall crafts. And we have a tradition where we’ll get our first pumpkin-spiced lattes together, have a 3-2-1 countdown, and then we’ll sip them at the same time.
It’s silly, but it makes it more magical!

After my dad left when I was 8, money got tight. So every autumn, in between long shifts and housekeeping, my mom knitted me a new school sweater. I was embarrassed to wear them. Except the gray one, because it had a Gap tag.
At 32, clearing out her house, I found it. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I understood that the tag was cut from an old Gap shirt and stitched in with her thread.
On the inside of the tag, she’d written, “Mom’s here.”
She must have known I was ashamed, so she put all her handicraft into making it look store-bought.
It’s been 5 years. I’ve learned to knit now. Every autumn I knit new sweaters for my own kids. And always attach “Mom’s here” tags to them.