Pumpkin Spice

Truth: I do not like pumpkin spice anything. Except I do like the spices I mix into the pumpkin pies I make from scratch at Thanksgiving. I like pumpkin pie. I like pumpkin pie with whipped cream, to be precise.

Larger Truth: I love pumpkins. Un-spiced. Big Love. This fruit of the gourd family and the picturesque mascot of all things fall makes me abundantly happy.  That’s saying something, because I am a summer person through and through.

My dad’s mother, when I was in college, lived about twenty-five minutes from my dorm. My grandmother never knew a holiday, special occasion, or season she did not celebrate with abandon. She had a very limited mid-Missouri farmer’s budget, but she did like a reason to party. The year I lived the closest to her that I ever would until her last year on Earth, she made sure that, when she visited me at school that September and “shared a Coca-Cola” with me, I was gifted a little gourd pumpkin. “For your desk in your room,” was her guidance.

Every fall of my adult life, my husband and I have had a gourd pumpkin in the kitchen. Many more than one when our son was growing up. My grandmother taught me that these little wonders like to be inside and “can take the heat because they aren’t as juicy” as the big ones you carve.

My son grew into my love of pumpkins. There was one particular year – Dakota was still small, sporting his Big Smith overalls and short legs – where my husband jokingly made the threat after school one day, “If you two bring one more pumpkin to this house….” He might have even wagged his finger at us.

And the fun began. I can’t pinpoint through the haze of history how many pumpkins came to our midtown home that year, but it was in the double digits. Like 20+. Nothing made Dakota happier than spotting another pumpkin with a great stem or a striking shape and saying to me, “Let’s sneak this home. Papa will never know.” (My mother’s chickens had a pumpkin feast right after Thanksgiving that year.)

The number of pumpkins dwindled in years after that. Well, dwindled to ten. Ten-ish. And it dwindled again when our son left for college.

To the one you see here.

Well, for now. I do have to go to the grocery store later today…

p.s. I miss my grandparents – all four of them – every day. Stupid me didn’t keep the little balsa wood Christmas tree my Grandma Ginny gave me “for my desk” a few months after the pumpkin. It was a little kit she had purchased at the Five and Ten Cent store in Boonville. She drove it all the way to Columbia so we could share another Coca-Cola.

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