I love the fall. The change in temperature brings with it a whole new idea of how to approach the world, including changes in wardrobe, changes in climate control choices, and changes in food.
There is also a change in decoration.
The outside of our house is quite literally overrun with mums. I blame this on a poor decision on my part during the early phase of my gardening career. We bought our house in the fall and the only thing blooming during that time was mums. Therefore, the one plant that returns to bloom in our front yard, year after year is the colorful flower. That is if you don’t count the dandelions.
Every October it is a family ritual to make the one hour quest to the eastern tip of Long Island on the North Shore and peruse the family farms that thrive during the fall harvest. Fresh fruits and vegetables. Fresh corn and pumpkins. Homey decorations to give the entire house an orange tint.
I love it.
Not just for the roasted corn.
Not just for the candy apples.
Not just for the smell of the outdoors and the ability to “get away from it all” along with 500,000 other New Yorkers.
Pumpkins. I love pumpkins.
Every year without fail it takes myself, my bride, and my brood about one hour to choose four decent pumpkins.
They are usually in a field or on a giant wooden cart stacked high. These are important decisions. These pumpkins will be carved up, or simply remain in their native state outside our house to represent our family to the world as they walk by looking for candy.
If the pumpkin is too big then we appear pretentious, trying to outdo the poor folks next door and that type of contest can only end in our eventually rolling out 400 pound steroid laden pumpkins in order to compete. No one wins on that slippery slope.
If the pumpkin is too small then you cannot see it from the street, let alone carve it up with any type of decency.
You don’t want a pumpkin that is too narrow and too fat seems out of proportion.
Yet there they all sit on the wooden cart or in the field. Big. Small. Fat. Skinny.
As I looked at the pumpkins this year, it occurred to me that these farms were moving a vast number of pumpkins. Even the pumpkins that we passed up as unacceptable to the Lemieux clan for the fall of 2008 would be scooped up by someone. What was imperfect to us was completely perfect to the next family that walked by.
I chalked it up to God’s infinite love of variety. Of more variety than the pumpkins were the people milling about. Getting faces painted, eating roasted corn, laughing as children ran and climbed apple trees.
Perhaps if I sat down with each of these people individually there would certainly be enough that we would disagree about, especially given the current political climate. For some reason, though, we all seemed to be unified on this one day to celebrate the fact that we loved, among other things, pumpkins. All types.
I can be so judgmental at times. Swiftly discarding people and making assumptions as I slide into my own interior defenses so that my precious little ego can escape intact. My moral superiority will not be overcome! I have it more together than you!
That lack of humility is about as silly as searching for the perfect pumpkin. For me to sit there and evaluate each person like a pumpkin misses the bigger picture.
God doesn’t love us like individual pumpkins. He is the farmer. Happy with the whole cart, knowing that the whole cart serves a purpose. He is probably disappointed when an individual is passed over, not utilized to the best of their ability, when they are rejected.
In the end, I think that God just loves pumpkins, even if we think we are the best pumpkins in the field.
