Month: October 2015

Growing up on a small farm, rural Minnesota
space was scarce, times were lean and the land was life
ma and pa granted my brother, sister and I a small plot
every spring in which to plant and nurture pumpkins;
sibling sharecroppers, we repaid mom by growing
enough extra pumpkins for her to fulfill familial
pie making duties through Thanksgiving, Christmas
and in good years, four or five quarts of canned squash

Indentured, we were, for the privilege of creating
toothless, carved fright for amusement every October
we grew two big pumpkins each, thinning the runts as
we saw fit, channeling growing energy into the larger,
bumpier, more potentially grotesque orange oddities
just for a month of autumnal family horror-ticulture

Becoming teenagers meant slowly relinquishing our
yearly pumpkin patch anticipation, subsequent budding
interest in jack-o-lantern growing slowly gave way to
preoccupations with sports, romance, cars, – disdain for
all else childlike or childish and definitely not cool
as mom slowly transformed our pumpkin patch into
feeble nasturtium arboretum, ringed with galling petunias
leaving us no room to protest as we had long since given
up any claim to the small plot of backyard fraternal field
of Halloween dreams leaving us with nothing but the
field stubble of memories, remnants of harvests past
long since completed, yet still vainly cultivated for
any rogue seedlings that may again someday sprout

– Mark L. Lucker
© 2015
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