It’s Not Fall Without Cornstalks//October 314th, 2020

 Does anyone else get a deeply sentimental fall feeling when they see cornstalks? 

For me, they just radiate autumn energy. There’s nothing that says “autumn” to me quite like seeing cornstalks arranged among pumpkins and scarecrows and hay bales, signaling that my favorite time of year is on its way. To hear them rustle when a breeze hits them, immediately takes me to a corn maze in mid-October, anticipating Halloween while trying to find my way around. 

However, I recently remembered why cornstalks are such a prominent, essential part of autumn/Halloween for me, and to say it’s kind of a funny story would be an understatement! 

Somewhere between the ages of about five and eight, I went somewhere with my Aunt Trish one weekend. On the way home, she decided to stop at one of the local farms. I can’t remember if this was her original intention or not, but she decided, while we were there, to pick up her cornstalks for the season for her outdoor decorating.

Aunt Trish, as I think I’ve mentioned before, is the person who got me into Halloween in the first place. It has always been her favorite holiday, and she went all out with her decorations when I was a kid, and was always a perfectionist. That day, we picked up somewhere between eight and ten cornstalks. Sounds nice and fallish, right?

Only problem was, at the time, Aunt Trish drove a tiny, two door Toyota sports car!

I can’t tell you what she was thinking; I’m not even sure she remembers herself. Was it a case of grim determination? Or was it case of underestimating the size of the cornstalks vs. the size of the car? I suppose we’ll never remember for sure, but the events that followed became a source of amusement for years.

Aunt Trish loaded every single one of those cornstalks into the backseat of the car. And, being the type of person she always has been, they were, of course, the fullest cornstalks the farm had to offer! After several minutes of desperate attempts to arrange the things, and likely some words that my pumpkinseed brain was unfamiliar with at the time, she finally decided the only solution was to push the seats forward, as if someone was about to climb into the backseat, and drive home hunched over while the cornstalks pushed against our seats and hung out the windows!

And so we did. And for some strange reason or another, I guess to distract ourselves from the awkward positions we were sitting in, we sang The Unicorn Song the whole way home. 

As I said earlier, this story became a source of amusement for years. I remember, after being dropped off that day, telling my mother about it while laughing hysterically. I believe I may have also told the story in school once when we were given a writing assignment based on interesting real life experiences. 

I also remember that, from the following year on, any time Aunt Trish needed cornstalks, she always brought a truck to the farm! (And, being me, I started giving her my allowance money to pick some out for our house as well, while my mother got annoyed that she had to pick all the corn off of them to keep the animals away! Aunt Trish actually once watched a bear steal one off her property.)

It’s funny how the strangest things can shape our personal history with our favorite things, but this was definitely one of my formative moments as a Halloween lover!

Stay spooky, my friends.