I accidentally grew a pumpkin
Autumnal reflections on the meaning of our struggles
Before I get into it, I just wanted to thank everyone that has read my work so far. It is still astonishing to me that a single person wants to read anything I have to write. Thank you!
For the second time, I have accidentally grown a pumpkin. Actually, we grew two. Originally, only one sprouted from the vine, but in the past couple months, another began to gorge itself in the seemingly fertile ground directly outside my door.
We did basically nothing to prepare the ground and only occasionally watered the vines. Nevertheless, they persisted. One may be a gourd — I’m no botanist — but the point stands. In the course of a little less than a year, two of the seeds of last year’s Halloween haul have grown magnificently into fully fledged pre-Jack-O’-lanterns of their own. I am not religious, and have criticism of organized religions similar to my mentor, and am hesitant to allocate all divinity to omnipotent creators. I will, however, ascribe divinity to the original omnipotent creator, nature.
Leaving my house some days, I would take a minute (usually prompted by Sarah) to admire the pumpkin vine’s growth. Slowly, surely, it advanced through the yard, stretching out toward the sun. No matter what happened in my day, a growing life waited for me at my house. I was surprised that it even sprouted, a new world born from the death on an old one.
When I told Sarah about this idea for a blog, they reminded me that this was not the first time we had accidentally grown pumpkins. Emerging from the morass of our compost pile at our old house in North Carolina was a girthy green stalk. It was a pumpkin plant birthed from the remains of Big Boy, the forty-plus pound pumpkin we found in the autumn of 2019. He lived, dormant, for over a year, through the scorching summer only the Carolinas can sustain, on our duplex’s porch. I can’t understate the gut punch feeling I had when I discovered the rot that permeated his posterior. Devastated, we laid him to rest gently in the compost pile, expecting nothing more from our massive son. He had lived a full life. That’ll do, pumpkin, that’ll do.
The stalk that grew from the compost pile was unlike anything I’d seen before. Thicker than a lacrosse stick, it extended out, nearly double my height across the small backyard, as if Big Boy was trying to reach back to his favorite spot in the sun once more. We were thrilled: maybe some of the pumpkins that grew from the stalk would be close to his size. As an avid consumer of pumpkin products1, I was particularly excited.
Then came the cutting. Our landlord2 scheduled lawn service and didn’t tell us. We were woken up in the morning to the sounds of the scythe. Another death, another waste of a young life. An unexpected life was taken from this world, and it hurt.
I understand I am being somewhat theatrical. To be fair, the doctor who showed my mother her ultrasound prophetically told her that I would be dramatic. Before I was born, I was condemned to this fate. More or less.
No matter what, however, I am thankful that life is able to flourish despite considerable adversity. These two gourds that have plumped up in our care have reminded me of the importance of caring, the importance of nurturing, but also the importance of allowing nature to take its course. Not everything can be solved in a day; in fact, sometimes, those quick-fix solutions may be less effective in the long-run. I mean, Marx identified the processes of capitalist reproduction in the late 1800s, but it honestly feels like they were closer to dismantling those structures in their time than we are now3. But these things take time. The Lenin quote is apt here, but also the great Matt Christman quote equating the organizer to a craftsman working on the pyramids. I can’t find the exact source, but it is such an impressive summation of the work of the greater left, basically arguing that each individual is one worker in the construction of a grand project that they may never see the completion of, and that we should not expect an earthly reward for this yeoman’s work, but that the untold future generations of future humans will ultimately benefit from our efforts. My instant-gratification-wired brain kinda hates this, but it does help in those times when I am feeling dejected or depressed. When we succeed, the world will be saved, humanity will rejoice, and our work will be honored. Our goal is to live up to that eventual praise and trust that our resilient species is able to live up to our expectations.
I can admit that I am a sucker for a Starbucks Pumpkin Chai. I would drink the pumpkin cream cold foam by itself if I wasn’t worried about my health.
read: slumlord
And honestly, due to the entrenching nature of capitalism, they may have been.