It’s fall here in southwestern Michigan and it’s magical. Temperatures have dropped, colors on the trees have risen. Orange, red, umber, yellow, magenta – it’s not quite a rainbow but close.
The leaf peepers are out and about too. These are people from other states who come on weekends to view the spectacular show of color. Hotels and restaurants hike their rates for these visitors, as well as for the football enthusiasts who flock to Notre Dame games.
People around here are into haunted houses. Niles, a community two towns over, spends all year creating its Scream Park. Even though only twelve thousand people live in Niles, approximately seventy thousand visitors take a trip each year through “the scariest, creepiest, most-blood curdling attractions this side of the Continental Divide.” There are three haunted houses, a haunted hayride, and the field of screams.
If the Scream Park isn’t enough, many area residents decorate the outside of their homes for Halloween, just like they do for Christmas. A neighbor of mine has a gallows hanging in his yard (Creepy!), while a homeowner a couple miles away has a front yard full of pumpkins, gourds, hay bales arranged to look like giant worms, ghosts, and witches.
Corn mazes are also popular this time of year. For the uninitiated, a corn maze is a real life replica of those paper mazes you did in school. The kind where your pencil roamed down various trails in a labyrinth, looking for the right way to get from start to finish. Around here farmers create six-foot high mazes in their cornfields once the produce is picked. Guests go their way with a flare because if they are terminally lost they can send it up and a ranger rescues them. It’s just that there’s a humiliation factor in not being able to find your way through the maze.
I’ve experienced many autumns in many different places, but there is something special about southwestern Michigan this time of year. It’s definitely life in the show lane, as well as the slow lane.
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