“Fall makes me think that if I fail horribly at this art thing, and then fail horribly with this writing thing, I’ll go run a pumpkin patch.”
I think there is nothing more magical than a pumpkin patch. And I have lived in Wilmington for 26 years and always wanted to go to the pumpkin patch at Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church which has been going for the month of October for 28 years. It is truly magical. To go at night with twinkly lights everywhere, straw pathways and platforms full of pumpkins, families everywhere checking out pumpkins in every shape and size and even different colors, happy children pulling wagons with bright smiles on their faces, and the young teen that helped me pulling a wagon alongside me as I looked for pumpkins that were just right. I picked two bigger ones and two tiny ones to sit beside them. They are on my front porch now. Perhaps if I fail at this writing thing I’ll go run a pumpkin patch!
It is so hard for me to leave the house and I rarely do and don’t go many places but there was something about having the couple here all afternoon yesterday working outside from noon until after 6 p.m. cleaning up the yard, cutting the grass, cutting and shaping all of the bushes, generally making the yard look very nice, even with downed trees and debris piled at the front of the road and still big work to be done with trees that need to come down and big dangling branches in the back that need to be removed it was such a huge improvement it gave me a sense of beginning to get my life back, and thinking about other things besides the hurricane and all the damage and devastation. And yesterday morning when the dogs and I went outside it was so remarkably cool it felt like fall for the first time, and so after my helpers left I fed the dogs and I thought “I need to get my pumpkins!” and I just dashed out without thinking and drove straight to the pumpkin patch. As I arrived I was so nervous it was almost an out-of-body experience but I parked and walked around the side of the church into the magical scene above and I was just enchanted. Nothing existed but that pumpkin patch. It was like being in a fairy tale.
And now, because this is life, I can tell you that I have felt the whole gamut of things since then. I did not sleep well last night, had a dream that left me wistful and heartbroken about a lost love, left me with a sense of longing, and, after what seemed an eternity I went back to sleep. I was not quite right in myself when I got up with the dogs and put them in their harnesses to take them out but then we stepped out onto the front porch and there were the pumpkins, and for a moment the sense of magic returned. Pumpkins do that.
I don’t think I will carve them, I will leave them on the porch through Thanksgiving, and then I will figure out what to do with them. I want to really decorate for Christmas too. I want to live fully and celebrate life. That’s what “These Precious Moments” is all about. And I will be creating a special page just for this project that will talk about the magic of doing one of these 365 day projects too. You will find that new page some time this week when you click on the graphic link at the bottoms of these posts. For now it just links to yesterday’s post when I changed the focus of this project, but something special is happening now. I will take it one day, one moment at a time. In the end that’s all we ever have, one singular moment. It is a splendid place to rest and be. I am here now.
