You hop off the hayride, so excited to be choosing your first real pumpkins of the season.
As a child, you always worried. What if you couldn’t find the right one? Your mother was only going to wait so long for you to make a selection. You didn’t want a pumpkin that was bruised or scratched or soft, or any other kind of imperfect that a pumpkin could be. It had to be just right.
Now, though, pumpkin picking is a full experience. It’s not just about the pumpkins that will ride home with you in the end. Sure, you love to see the excited, sometimes envious eyes of the other patrons of the farm on the hayride back; you even instinctively keep your hands on your chosen pumpkins, just in case someone has the thought that they’re perfect enough to steal. But your time in the pumpkin patch is more precious to you, ultimately, than what you will take home.
As you walk through the patch, taking care not to trip over vines or disturb the pumpkins that aren’t quite what you’re looking for, you take it all in. The pumpkins are all fascinating to you, in their different shapes and sizes. They’re perfect in their imperfections. Even the dents, scratches, warts, and bruises have their strange way of beauty about them. The patch wouldn’t be as interesting, if every pumpkin was just perfect and round.
As you continue on, you see it. A sight that both intrigues and saddens you; a combination of melancholy and poetic beauty. There, among the sea of orange, is a pumpkin that’s rotting, and starting to turn black. You can see the seeds and the liquified guts inside, through the large depression on the side of the pumpkin facing you, a white mold vaguely resembling snow, forming around the wrinkled edges. You wonder how such a hole got there. Was it an unruly visitor to the patch? You hope, if it was, that it was an animal as opposed to a human. You never did understand that pumpkin smashing mentality. Is it, perhaps, that this pumpkin has just sat around too long, never anyone’s choice, and just began to rot all on its own?
Whatever it is, you feel for it. You may be the only person in the patch who even notices it, or walks by it with a thought beyond ‘eww’, and there is a part of you that wishes you could take it with you. You wonder how long it’s been there, suffering in silence like this, and how long it will remain. Will a farmer come by and remove it? Or will it simply waste away into the soil of the pumpkin patch, perhaps helping provide nutrients for next year’s crop?
Either way, you feel sad that it won’t get to experience Halloween like most of its brothers and sisters will. It’s a shame, really. It probably already looks more horrific than any face a person could carve into one of its rounder, untarnished siblings, yet it will never get the chance to truly become part of a display.
You think to yourself, though, that Halloween wouldn’t be the same without these rotting pumpkins. The sight of the exposed seeds and guts, the smell that just vaguely signifies that something is starting to go wrong...It’s death at its finest, and isn’t that, ultimately, what autumn represents?
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