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The Betty Blog

Why Do I Love the Pumpkins?

October 1, 2007

Why Do I Love the Pumpkins . . . or Is It All About October?

I do not know from whence cometh my love of pumpkins. I do not care. Do you believe that? It just is, like so much in life. It just is. Pumpkin love.

Maybe from anticipation of Halloween Carnivals it comes. Maybe from Thanksgiving’s Horn of Plenty.

Maybe from whiffs of fresh ditto ink flooding young nostrils or the feel of bright orange Crayolas against the pattern on a crisp page Mrs. Beasley or Mrs. Campbell or Mrs. Luckett gave me. She had one too for Dr. Leon and Mary and Nancy Ellen and Jerry and Claudia. Leon’s and mine were next to each other on the bulletin board in Mrs. Campbell’s room, that same room where I noticed Leon spells Noel backwards.

I heard one in our gang died in a motorcycle wreck? I hope she died happy and will wait for me in the afterlife where we will once again ride the rides at the MissLou Fair, play ball in the backyard against the boys, go biking with Mary, sing This Little Light of Mine at the top of our lungs down in the basement level Sunday School at Woodlawn, and march once more, with snares on our shoulders at the fifty yard line – we being the only girls in the percussion section, and me being the only queer-to-be among us drummers . . . no future homemakers club of America would do.

Didn’t we rip a hundred times or more the beat of Independentia March or The Horse or the Fanfare to 2001? The fun we had that year in the parade on Washington Street, until I quit Band to go sit with a boy at the pep rallies and the games . . . what trouble that got me in. Life might have been different, had I stayed in the band, where there was an identifiable dyke, Kathleen, in the trombone section . . . oh, yeah, there was her friend Linda in the French horns too. I digress.

Maybe from the pennies Stan and I laid out on the rails so the train would smash them in the morning, those times we stayed at Grandma Knight’s home there by the Illinois Central tracks at Taylor. With the blast sounding in approach of the crossing at 5:30 AM, when I jumped out of bed to see the cars go by and hoped we’d find the flattened copper that might still say in a blurred way something about trusting God. I loved trains for a long time and hoped for them in Tchula so we’d stop and watch.

Maybe from Miss Louise’s pies she made and knowing the Carnivals would be coming soon and she would bake her contribution for the cakewalk and put up balloons and get the darts ready for her senior class booth.

Maybe from the first chill hanging in the air with the smell of fresh cut weeds and powdered chalk lining the old football field before a game. Or, the sparkle of excitement in the lungs of cheerleaders and the snap of Mr. Boochie’s Wildcat Band that Pop made fun of, but he never hesitated to belt out the Culkin fight song when they played.

Or, the taste of the corndog we loved with mustard, so hot you had to blow on it. Or, the next day when Mary and I crawled under the bleachers looking for coins or empty liquor bottles we added to our secret collection in my playhouse. Mary and I told each other that joke: Under the Bleachers by Seymore Panties. We'd giggle and try to remember more book titles. I digress more.

Maybe pumpkin love is from the break at long last in the heat that comes in October to the Mississippi Delta. Memories of singing Maggie May on what seemed like long rides through the cotton fields, back and forth on State Hwy 49 between Vicksburg and Oxford to Ole Miss. The smoke rising from the chimney of a sharecropper’s home, I watched for and wondered what was cooking.

The sound of my own voice reading rhymes by James Weldon Johnson to my class at Amanda Elzy . . . or original poetry my students wrote for The Panther’s Paw, our literary journal.

Maybe from the faces Liz and Audrey and I carved at Ginger’s turquoise kitchen table or ours over in Rebecca’s house we lived in there on Hollywood Street. Maybe from our first subway rides that Fall when we drove a YouHaul truck from Memphis up to New York, I started graduate school, Liz went to Bankstreet where she used Crayolas to draw them and Audrey found a copy of Kate Millet's dissertation in a closet over at the English Department.

Or, maybe from the piles of them I saw stacked high going out to Newsday on Long Island or on the great orange lawns in Loudon County, Virginia, not far from Dulles, next to the nurseries and a petting zoo. Where Tonda and I went to pick one and maybe share some cider, select gourds and squash and a thousand chrysanthemums of gold or purple, pink or yellow, some other hybrid color for our backyard. And the first log fire of the season in our house there near Nottingham, where Tonda would laugh and say "No one knows!" and shake her head.

Maybe from that memory Liz and I share about the carefully selected ones with perfect stems and the leaves showing off their xanthophylls and such. . . those treasures I shipped off to her in a box stuffed with pages of The Washington Post that year she decided to stay down there in New Orleans where, in my mind anyway, Fall is never, well at least, you know, not so much.

Maybe from one night very young in October I sat at this fine computer, my mind off in another world with memories, and Miss Frances here in the basket by the telephone, making her noise scratching at the papers she would rather have there than just lie upon the naked basket bottom. Where the big guy Louie tries his best to curl and fit when she goes away. You know how they are, if one has it, the other will want it too. I am that way about some things.

Maybe from that sci fi story Ray Bradbury wrote using a quote from The Bard that Miss Louise loved: Something Wicked This Way Comes. And, she would say in her best lecture voice: Double, Double, Toil and Trouble! Sometimes I miss her, Miss Louise. I dreamed about her last night. We were riding in a train car going somewhere. She was asleep and I had my left arm around her. It is amazing how she has me worry still about the punctuation, verb agreement, is everything parallel and do any participles dangle?

Maybe it doesn't matter where it comes from, pumpkin love. It just so happens that it is, and it is that way about one person in this world. It just so happens that it is.

(Photo Credit Unknown)