Picking pumpkins and memories

It is 10 days until Halloween. The news feeds are loaded with the stories of young families venturing out to find an orange treasure to set out on their front step.  Everyone gets one.   Everyone has different tastes and needs when finding the perfect one. Most of the little people want the biggest pumpkin in the pile and most of their families find a way to haul it to their cars.   Sometimes I see a little pair of hands clutching a wee little one as if it is the Hope diamond.  They are scenes playing out all over this country this month and they come with their own set of memories.

As a kid my mother and our next door neighbor, Mrs. Tucker, would load up all 8 of us in a big station wagon with no seat belts and a "way back" rear facing seat and drive to a huge farmers stand close by in New Jersey with "The Monster Mash"  probably playing on the radio. Every year we went together as an extended family and had cider and doughnuts and got pumpkins.  I can vividly remember the bright painted faces on so many of those pumpkins, but, for the life of me cannot remember the name of the orchard.  It is a memory I hold dear of innocent times with friends.  I learned to roast fresh seeds that came in those pumpkins, and to reach in and grab the glop of pumpkin guts.  We would carve them and light them and gaze at them. The next week we would go trick or treating, after the obligatory group picture, from right after school until dark.  We used huge grocery bags or pillowcases to get our loot.  We went out alone, without escorts or guardians. My mother always always made lentil soup on Halloween for dinner, my guess is because it could warm us up and could be served to whomever wandered in at any time.

A few miles from my current home in any direction are lots of places to pick the perfect pumpkin. The festivals abound and the crisp air helps the mood.   Just at the end or our lane, on the other side of a very old stone wall, are fields that are cultivated yearly by Penn State and grow a variety of things, mostly corn but often tomatoes, beans,potatoes, grasses and who knows what else.  Years ago they grew pumpkins.  Acres and acres of pumpkins.  I am sure they were testing something in the crop or in the soil but I never found out what.  What I do know is that as summer turned to fall the fields were left to rot.  The vegetation wilted and the dots of orange were visible and plentiful.  It was as if the pumpkin fairy had stopped by just for my kids and their friends!  We wandered down the lane with a wagon and high hopes.  It did not take long to realize that we could fill the wagon and still not have made a dent in the harvest.  That is exactly what we did.  Picked and chose and loaded up.  Along with the pumpkins came corn stalks to place around the door and to top it off, it was Indian corn so we got some of that, too.  I will never forget how perfect it was.  I have not seen the university plant pumpkins there again.  Curious.

This week I hope to choose my own orange orb, roast the seeds and carve it into something.  It will not be the artistic type of jack-o-lantern that my son Adam can do, but it will be fine.  It would be much more fun to go with a car full of kids to get one and someday, maybe, I will get to do that again, in the meantime, I will watch the Great Pumpkin on TV and enjoy the season filled with sweet memories, warm cider, lentil soup and try not to dip into the bags of candy until after the trick-or-treaters are gone for another year.