Orange joy bundles

I thought much yesterday about pumpkins and why I like them so much. Not just to eat. I like the way they look. Their round abundant shape, how they appear ripe and firm and ready to offer up their bounty. I like the way the rind looks; tender but at the same time durable like leather. 

The way a pumpkin feels to the touch, smooth and soft, with slight bumps, wrinkles, perfect in its imperfections. I like how you have to wrap your arms around then to pick them up. The way they sound when you pat them, hollow but then not. I thought what I liked the best about them was their color, orange. But yesterday I learned they come in grey. Oh, I knew about the various shades of orange and yellow and the greens and reds. I knew about white ones but the grey, that was a surprise; a plethora of emotion; awe, disgust, joy, surprise, humor, tenderness.

 I have orange ones in my kitchen all year long and to see them anytime gives me joy and cause to smile. They are jolly in their bright orange casings. I would put green and red and golden ones in my bedroom. Grey and pale green pumpkins, those would sit very well in my living room, all year, not just in fall. I have a happy pumpkin on my porch right now. He sits where I can pat him as I pass. We do not carve them at my house. That is pumpkin abuse. I love to see jack o’ lanterns. But I would not do it.

 When my children were little I would buy each of them a pumpkin with a painted face on it which they would name and carry around and talk to. My parents would make a ritual of the pumpkin carving at our house. 

We would buy a pumpkin at a local festival and the next day my dad would make homemade donuts and mom would mull apple cider and spread newspaper all over the table and we would all sit down and watch as my dad took the longest sharpest knife I had ever seen and proceeded to commit surgery on the pumpkin. Mother like a dutiful nurse would hand him a large silver spoon and he would scoop all the stringy seed guts from inside. The aroma of spicy donuts with cinnamon sugar and scented cider mixed with pumpkin was amazing.

 He would then turn the pumpkin around several times looking for the perfect face side and then he created a face. It was never the same. Some years it was funny, some it was scary. He never would tell and we would never know until he turned it around.  Mother then put a fat candle inside and we would take it to the porch and light it. Full of donuts and cider instead of dinner and milk it was a holiday and the start of the season toward Christmas, visions of Santa now danced in our heads

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Lady Tamara www.HighlandTitles.com has cupcake tastings this morning so I must be off. I wonder could I farm my little plot of land in Scotland and become a pumpkin Lord? How many pumpkin plants can grow on …..