Pumpkin Hunting

     One of my favorite Halloween traditions has always been pumpkin carving. My family used to sit on the lawn or porch (depending on the house) with my mother and father cutting wide circles on the tops of bumpy orange pumpkins. My family and I would dig hands and spoons inside the fleshy cavity and pull out handfuls of amber-ish gut, speckled with cream-colored seeds, ripping strings from the walls of the gourd. 

     So imagine the stress when it was only a day before Halloween and my family still had not gotten carving pumpkins. Everyday that was meant to be reserved for picking out pumpkins wound up consumed by other much more mundane tasks, and now we appeared to be up sh*t creek without a paddle. And, as luck would have it, my mother still didn’t have time to go out hunting for pumpkins. Desperate to juggle every engagement she had, my mother gave my sister her car keys and sent the two of us out on a scavenger hunt. 

     This wouldn’t be anything unusual, my sister and I are both usually pretty responsible when it comes to a mission so dire, and she’s 22 (recently) and I’m 15 (about to be 16). The only thing standing in the way of this being a routine procedure is the fact that my sister doesn’t have a license…or a permit, for that matter. It’s not like she’s never driven or is bad at driving for that matter, she just never got around to it because it was around that age that she had to repeat a grade, had her 504 plan violated and eventually had to drop out due to the school mishandling her situation. But it was fine, I trust my sister. 

     So off we set off in the car to find pumpkins. We found nothing at the first spot, or the second spot, or the third, or fourth, and so on. 3 groceries stores, 3 garden shops, and a CVS (we were desperate) later and we were still empty handed except the bags of candy we got for trick-or-treaters at the aforementioned CVS. We discussed going to Trader Joe’s but that would mean getting on the highway, and my sister figured our mother wouldn’t want her first time driving on the highway to be with me in the car. 

I finally had the idea to call our Dad and ask (beg) him to take us to Trader Joe’s after he got home from work, as Trader Joe’s had a complex of tents set up outside with every type of pumpkin you could imagine, from cinderellas to jarrahdales to luminas, and, of course, classic carving pumpkins. 

     We spent from 5:00 to 5:30 in the car without father on a stopped-up highway while he grumbled frustratedly to himself and occasionally snapped at something Camille was doing. We stopped first at Whole Foods, my sister trying to salvage the peace of the trip by jokingly pointing out it was her first time driving on the highway. Our dad didn’t seem very amused. After a spin around the store, we found nothing and back into the car we went. 

Our father drove the rest of the way to the summit with the two of us in almost complete silence. Our dad said he liked the music, my phone was hooked up to the car and I was bouncing through my downloaded songs. My sister said I had good music taste and I smiled. 

     Trader Joe’s was a bust. There was a massive cardboard bin beneath a red tent filled with decorative pumpkins too firm to slice into and gut. I decided we would give up. I was staring out the backseat window, maybe a little more upset than reasonable, when I noticed we weren’t heading in the direction of home and poked my head into the front seat to ask what we were doing. Apparently we had one more stop, Walmart. 

     I’ve only been in Walmart a handful of times, six times at most. My mother’s anxiety extended to some reasonable things, power outages, storms, the end of the world (a bit theatrical but understandable nonetheless), and unreasonable things, like Walmart. She was so opposed to it that once as a child I drew a picture of her standing outside a Walmart, crying and screaming “NOOOOOOOOO!!!”. All but two times I’d been there I had been with my father. My father began looking around the Holiday section, which, needless to say, had been prematurely conquered by a certain red-green-gold-and-silver holiday. My sister and I sprinted to the garden section. And finally, the fruits of our labors, or vegetables (, gourds?), were right there, sitting in a final sale buggy with a few pumpkin carving kits my parents had never bothered to buy. 

     We picked 2, the limit our mother had given us for the night before the holiday the decorations were intended for, and carried them into the main part of the store, where we got a few other things we needed and then went through self-check. Our father stopped by a tiny, sketchy, far off the road liquor store for bourbon while we sat in a locked car still listening to music from my phone like we were young kids again. 

     When we arrived home, our father went to paint in the bathroom and we laid beach towels on the kitchen table and each turned a pumpkin into a work of art.