Good grief, Halloween is on the horizon and until today, we remained pumpkinless. But, at the suggestion of my 17 year old, almost as if she were reading my mind ( I love when we are on that same frequency), this evening we rounded up a small group of perfect pumpkins from a local church-sponsored pumpkin patch. Of course, wandering through a collection of pumpkins always reminds me of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Even if it wasn’t an actual pumpkin patch like the one where Linus and Sally camp out waiting for the Great Pumpkin to appear, the sentimental nostalgia of the pumpkin holiday was not lost on me.
I love that my girls were more than game to head out during the dinner hour for a head-clearing drive with a stop for pumpkins. Honestly, it was quite lovely to wander through the church’s created pumpkin patch with all of the different sizes and colors and gourd options, especially because they weren’t able to host this fun fundraiser last year due to the devastation from Helene. There was a quiet sense of joy as we wandered along the paths of pumpkins, taking in the fall colors, the low-hanging sun glinting off the pumpkin surfaces, the evening coolness. I suppose it was another small reminder that time does bring healing and normalcy.
Picking out pumpkins is something our family has done together for several years, ever since our girls were quite young. When we lived in Rhode Island, my dad worked at a local apple farm where he drove the hayride tractor. Each year we would head out on a Saturday afternoon to find pumpkins, buy some apples, pick out a sweet treat, and ride the hay wagon again and again and again. When we moved to North Carolina, we made a point to visit some of the local apple orchards here in search of the perfect pumpkins while also enjoying things like sensory corn pits, wagon rides, corn mazes, and fresh air.
I love that tonight my girls and I got to savor those kinds of moments together.
There is something beautiful in the simplicity of wandering through pumpkins together, considering shapes, stems, colors, and potential decorative delight. I love that my girls each found perfect petite pumpkins, the sign actually designated all the tiny pumpkins in that area as perfect pumpkins and each one was only a dollar. We were thrilled with the selection. They each then wandered off in different directions, the 17 year old in search of a white snowball pumpkin and the 15 year old on the hunt for a just right medium-sized option. I love that my 15 year old found one she said called to her.
Some days, these are the exact things we need. Some days it can feel a bit like we are Charlie Brown, the kid whose Halloween bucket is filled with rocks instead of candy. But here’s the thing about that—when the show first aired back in 1966, apparently viewers mailed candy to Charles Schulz’s California studio because they felt sorry that Charlie Brown’s efforts hadn’t yielded him anything but rocks. A trip to the pumpkin patch tonight was like that for me, like someone, in my case these two remarkable young women, giving me candy in place of the rocks. Because to be honest, some days you might carry an undefined sadness and need a change of perspective. And sometimes, that change of perspective comes in the shape of pumpkins and the smiles on your teenagers faces in the middle of a tiny, perfect pumpkin patch.