WHAT KIND OF PUMPKIN GIRL ARE YOU?
I am obsessed with pumpkins this year. Not just any pumpkins but…black pumpkins. Black pumpkins, you say? Are these new, are they at the grocery store, some sort of heirloom variety? No, No and No.
They are spray painted Styrofoam pumpkins. Matte black, shiny black, glitter black, metallic black, hammered metal black. I have a permanent black circle on my trigger finger from spray painting any pumpkin I can find, you guessed it, black.
Pumpkins have always been an obsession of sorts. They were my favorite holiday icon September through November as a child. It was then and still is today a thrill when I see the first big display at the local grocery store. I waited impatiently for my mother to purchase ours for carving. What a grand sight it was to see the Jack-o‘-lanterns in the windows the evening before Halloween. We lived in coastal Texas and three days was the bug infested maximum most moms could stand.
My sisters and I grabbed the TV Guide off the stands to see when “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” debuted each year. Although I have a DVD and have had for many years now, I still watch religiously when it comes on TV. I cannot help myself. Sometimes I even think The Great Pumpkin will come this time.
I decorated everything with orange construction paper pumpkins. My earliest trick or treat bags had Jack-o‘-Lanterns on them. These trick or treat bags might consist of a paper bag (most of the time) in which the pumpkin was carefully glued, mosaic style. I can still smell the glue that came out of the plastic jar on a red spatula attached to the lid, it looked like cake icing and smelled sweet enough to eat. As a knowing child, I never did, for I had been assured by the nuns at school, that those who did went blind. Nuns knew an amazing amount of blind children, but that that’s a story for another time.
Some years we got lucky and had pillow cases that had outlived their usefulness. With these I became a little more artistically evolved. I would color the pumpkin on the bag with the fattest orange crayon I could find, then sneak into my mothers laundry room, ironing the image until the orange crayon melted into the fabric. The only trouble was, it usually melted into the iron also, then onto my dads work shirts. (Needless to say my ability to beg a years worth of candy was in serious peril that year!)
During my earth mother days of the 1970’s, I was making everything from scratch. I was determined to make the perfect pumpkin pie. We had pumpkin coming out of our ears as I ventured forth in pumpkin pie land. I also made pumpkin biscuits, pumpkin pancakes and pumpkin cake and bread. Had I known then about pumpkin lattes, martinis and ravioli, I would have made those too.
We were living in a rural North Dakota community at the time and every one had bundles of corn shucks, hay bales and pumpkins at the front door. Scarecrows were “De Regueur” and the hottest contest around was who could grow a 500lb pumpkin.
When my children were young, I passed the pumpkin torch onto them. We gutted and carved pumpkins, sat them in the windowsill with a light inside, and munched on the roasted seeds while we stood outside and admired our handiwork. They eventually grew and grew out of the pumpkin aka Jack-o’-Lantern phase. As they went on to date and marry, I had to satisfy my pumpkin obsession with a mantle display of non-edibles I had purchased over the years.
Those wood, plastic, clay, porcelain, and metal pumpkins were the guardians over the holiday season until the cycle started all over again with grandchildren. I became YA-YA to an ever growing brood of new little ones. Once again I had the joy of making Trick or Treat bags adorned with pumpkins, we used paper bags with handles because no one was touching my 600 thread count pillow cases.
Autumn trips to southern cities like Charleston and Savannah, gold and orange hues of Taos, New Mexico, the autumn color of grapevines in Napa, California have all deepened my pumpkin love. With each place so different from the last, one thing remained constant in the season…the reliable pumpkin.
Now, as I qualify for cheaper pricing at both IHOP and Goodwill, I have passed the pumpkin guardians from my mantle onto my two daughters who now have the pumpkin fever with their children. At the entryway of our senior years, my husband and I have downsized possessions while upsizing our lifestyle. Gone are the granola days, hay bales and bundles of corn shucks. The coffee pot is now an espresso maker, we can afford to drink top of the line liquor, eat artisinal beef ordered over the internet, with multiple black pumpkins lining the mantle looking ever so chic.
But every once in a while in October, the wind blows just right at dusk and my hand involuntarily closes around a worn out pillow case for which my father sacrificed a shirt. It is then I can hear my sisters laughing and friends shouting, “C’mon, we want to get four blocks further this year!” I am dawdling again, lagging behind looking at the pumpkin in the window with a jagged smile and winking eye. I pull myself away from the pumpkin and run back to my friends. As the memory and the laughter fades, it’s then that I realize I am still just a regular old orange pumpkin girl, with black pumpkins and great memories.
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