Last week I found two maple leaves lying near their mother tree, part of a new season painted in shades of burgundy, orange and gold. The leaves felt so small and fragile when I cupped them in my hands, carried them inside and set them gently on the windowsill above our kitchen sink.
Autumn has been my favorite time of year since my childhood in Aberdeen, Wash., even when the season seemed to blur through a curtain of rain. After sloshing through puddles on my way home from school, I’d shake out my red umbrella and slip off my rain boots in the front hallway. My grandmother, wearing her cobbler apron, would be waiting in the kitchen with homemade bread — still warm from the oven — gingersnaps and a red apple. She’d pour us each a cup of hot tea, and we’d sit at the table in the breakfast nook while I told her about my school day: “A” grades in reading and story writing, the teacher’s red pencil marks on my arithmetic paper and all the news from recess with my best friend.
On Halloween night my little brother and I trick-or-treated through our neighborhood, and we could hear kids comparing their bags of candy all the way up the block. The best treats — homemade popcorn balls — always came from our house. I remember my mom stirring batches of popcorn into a kettle of hot syrup, then buttering her hands and shaping the sticky candy into balls. After they cooled, Mom bagged them in plastic and tied curly orange ribbons around the tops. Sometimes she also baked sugar cookies, with orange frosting and chocolate chips for the jack-o’-lanterns’ faces. Earlier in Halloween week, she helped my brother and me carve our pumpkins and let us goosh the guts around before she scooped the slimy mess out of the shells.
My own children, adults now, still remember carving the rare Halloween “pump-kini” — an unfortunate spawn of a pumpkin and zucchini, which cross-pollinated when I planted them side by side in our vegetable garden. That strange squash probably marked the beginning of my career as an impetuous gardener.
Memories of past Halloweens led me outside to our pumpkin patch, where I sighed at the motley assortment of slackers in the largest of the three raised beds. A squirrel with vampire teeth apparently had gnawed a bowl-shaped hollow in a green and yellow pumpkin, which is now collecting rainwater and turning to mush. Another pumpkin, originally white, is a pale, sickly green with brownish freckles. Several others have flat-out balked and stopped growing. I knew the remaining pumpkins needed a pep talk, and I walked in a slow circle around the patch, trying to come up with a cheery, upbeat message. Actually, though, I was more in the mood to deliver a threat.
“Listen, guys,” I said. “It’s only five weeks until makeover day, when you turn into jack-o’-lanterns. Imagine yourselves on Halloween, with your cute, comic or scary faces glowing on our front porch, and little children and friendly teenagers thinking you’re really cool. It’s sad, though, that some of you won’t make it onto the porch. See the chicken-wire bins out there, past the garden beds and behind the big pine trees? If you can’t bulk up and look like sturdy jack-o’-lanterns by late October, you’ll get a one-way ride in the wheelbarrow to those compost bins — after I goosh your guts out.”
Rozen writes about gardening and family life from her home in Moscow. She may be contacted at scraftroze@aol.com.
