Eighth of an Acre Bounty

Hmmm, not so scary eh…wait

There we go!

So this is our pumpkin, hefted fresh from the fields by Gary last weekend. Almost 60 pounds of pumpkin, in fact. This little endeavor is the first pumpkin I have carved since being all grown up. I honestly can’t recall the last pumpkin I carved as a kid. I’d been toying with the idea of carving a pumpkin last year, but never got around to it. This past weekend, opportunity presented itself and we got this gem.

Gary actually picked the pumpkin. He was reluctant and was generally humoring me (he does that a lot, good man) when I mentioned making a jack o lantern. But once we got into the fields he was all business, searching out the perfect one. I suspect our selection of such a large pumpkin has something to do with a PBS (?) documentary we watched about a year ago, following people obsessed with growing giant pumpkins.

We had a really good time Sunday night, spreading squash guts over every inch of the kitchen and generally making a mess and getting obsessive. I think this may become a tradition. Besides, pumpkin seeds are inside pumpkins (yum). We live in a neighborhood where people still take their kids out trick or treating to actual houses. This seems to be more and more of a rarity with everyone so petrified of their neighbors and the world in general. So we get a lot of foot traffic on Halloween and vow to always stock the good stuff candy-wise.That is if we can keep our dirty hands off of it in the days leading up to the big night.

Our first real Halloween after moving in to the house we were woefully unprepared for the amount of kids we would get and ran out of candy. This was when there was still a grocery store in our neighborhood and Gary left me to go over to the IGA and pick up some more. I had a little bit of candy left in the bowl and the door rang while he was gone. I opened the door to a giant gaggle of children all clamoring for sweets. I rationed out the candy, one piece per kid, absolutely anxious that I was going to run out. But it worked, I saw the last kid come up with outstretched bag and I dropped my last piece in and heaved a sigh of relief. As the crowd of children moved off the porch and I started to turn to go inside, I heard the littlest voice say “trick or treat”. Horrified, I turned to see that behind all of the other crowding children had been one more child, the littlest Batman in the whole entire world. He was standing there, arms stretched out with his bag open smiling at me.

I just about died – I had no more candy. I didn’t even have cash as Gary and I had pooled our money to send him to the store. I had to tell him that I just ran out of candy. And before my very eyes the littlest Batman in the world got even smaller. He completely deflated. His arms dropped down to his side, his eyes cast toward the ground and his shoulders slumped. He mumbled a tiny little “ok” and turned to walk away with his feet dragging. My heart broke.

We do not live in a rich nieghborhood, far from it. Each year a number of the kids at our door don’t even have costumes. They come around guided by an older brother or sister clutching a pillowcase or a schoolbag as thier candy bag. So Halloween is always a bit of mixed emotions for me. It is nice to see some semblance of what I remember from my childhood nieghborhood preserved nowadays. But it is also tough to see kids who don’t have the chance to fully involve themselves in the excitement of picking a costume/charachter and playing dress up for a night. Kids who didn’t dress up because they had parents that were working and didn’t have the time  or cash to figure out a costume with them. Kids who are self conscious when they show up at your door in thier regular clothes and school backpack halfway unzipped as a makeshift bag. Older brothers or sisters in the background with uncomfortable smiles.