Sandi Villarreal

Fall in San Antonio explodes with color: Giant, brightly painted alebrijes greet visitors to La Villita and the River Walk. Downtown hotels prepare to host visitors to Muertos Fest at Hemisfair, a three-day Día de los Muertos celebration featuring elaborate altars and live music. It’s a time when the barrier between the living and the dead perhaps becomes slightly more permeable, and we all seem pretty okay with it. “Can anyone tell what they’re unloading from the side door there?

Throughout Ken Paxton’s seemingly centuries-long campaign for Senate, the attorney general has been a punching bag for not only his opponent, Democrat James Talarico, but also late-night talk show hosts, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Texans who might vote for him, and the president of the United States. Recent polls show Paxton down as much as six points in his race against Talarico, a shocking number in a state that hasn’t seen a Democrat win a statewide seat since 1994.

Creeeeak. Scream. Splash. Repeat ad nauseam. These are the waning days of summer (read: the hottest days of the year are still to come), and my husband is stationed at the edge of the dock at Blue Hole Regional Park, in Wimberley. He’s on his second tour of rope-swing duty, pulling the triangular handle back with an L-shaped PVC pipe, handing it to the next kid in line. He hoists up some of the smaller ones and pushes them off into a frigid Cypress Creek.