I paid ten dollars for a pumpkin.

     It was Halloween, and we at the stand were all out of pumpkins.

     Not that tragic, I suppose, except for the fact that I had to force myself to direct customers looking for pumpkins to the competition for the last few days of being open (and nobody wants to do that). I tried not to be sad about it, which meant not thinking about last year, when we had so many pumpkins left over that we lined our entire street with them at 12:30 AM on Halloween night. Every year has to be bad for something; this is farmer logic. This year was crappy for pumpkins.

     I made peace with the reality, this being the adult thing to do, until Halloween came and I realized I didn't have one single pumpkin to carve. Then I started to think about crying.

    My sister was going to go trick-or-treating with my cousins, so I drove her over to their house. She had saved a pumpkin to carve. In fact, after carving a face in it, she put it on her head. It is a mildly disconcerting experience to have a pumpkin-headed person in your passenger seat. On the way to my cousins' house, we passed an Amish place where several pumpkins were sitting out in the yard for sale.

     "You should buy one," my sister said to me.

     And I'm like, "Buy a pumpkin from someone else? Are you crazy?"

     But pride, as you will learn if you read your Bible, is a counterproductive entity. I dropped her off, headed back down the road, and swung in the driveway at the Amish house. Because if I'm going to buy a pumpkin that I didn't grow from anybody else, it'll be from the Amish.

    I went to the door, and the two cutest little boys in the history of the world over appeared on the other side of the screen. I explained to them I wanted to buy some (or all) of their pumpkins. The older one did the talking, told me the prices, and gave me change when I paid with a twenty. I thanked him profusely and went to load the pumpkins into my truck.

    The small white one I managed with no trouble. Zeroing in on an enormous pinky-orange one, I had every confidence in my ability to pick it up and sling it into the truckbed. Farmgirl power and all that. My confidence went from a ten to a five as I slid my hands underneath the bottom, then down to a one when I tried to lift it, and finally plummeted to a zero when I couldn't get the thing to budge at all. Okay, I thought, time to call someone.

    The door slapped shut, and out came the older boy. I'm guessing he didn't need my feeble explanation to know that I wasn't getting it, but I explained the situation to him anyway, because I like embarrassing myself. We both put our muscles to it, and still couldn't move the pumpkin. "It's heavy!" my Amish friend said, laughing, because I guess it was funny. Me, I felt rather sabotaged. First I had no pumpkin. Now I'd found one, and I couldn't even get it into my truck? What was this?

     Then the Amish boy had an idea.

     I watched him run to a shed near the cow pasture, kick through a pile of assorted cast-off lumber, pick out an old door, and bring it back to the scene. When I caught on to his plan I opened the passenger side door, he laid the door against the seat, and together, the little Amish boy and I rolled that son of a gun up the ramp and landed it inside the truck. I think it weighed somewhere between 90 and 900 pounds.

     "That's clever!" I said. He just shrugged and gave me the most adorable smile I will ever see in my life. "Thank you!" he said, and went off towards the house. I wanted to get a selfie with him but the sensible part of me had a rare moment of victory and I got in my truck and drove back home, pleased as punch that I had overcome such incredible odds and procured for myself, not only a pumpkin, but the biggest one I'd ever had. And I paid ten dollars for that thing too, which is not too shabby.

     When I got home, I realized I was never going to get that sucker into the house onto my dining room table. Plus it would take me a good three hours to carve it. So I dumped it (literally) next to the front door, and instead carved the smaller white one, while listening to Warren Zevon sing 'Werewolves of London' and compulsively eating Heath pieces. No trick-or-treaters came to our house that night, and we weren't up to any of our old tricks like some years before.

    Nevertheless my pumpkins sat proudly by the door; never let it be said that Emma can't find what she's looking for.


     What did you do for Halloween? Did you carve a pumpkin?

      ~Emma