Pumpkins in Waiting

Their light still dim, but growing...

You can tell it's early October. The pumpkins have not yet gathered their strength. For now, they hang in large groups, murmuring. As it gets closer to Halloween, we'll need to keep an eye on them. Some of them grow hoary, confrontational, threatening to drop onto your foot. Rot on your porch.

Soon it will be time to send in the children, who will wrap their arms around them, and ask to take them home. Where they will gut them and carve them up, and stick burning candles inside their gaping mouths.

Some will be chosen for other purposes: Crowded against lesser squashes in a harvest centerpiece. Turned to pie fodder. Reduced to a spice haunting someone's oven. Reduced to a syrup, cloying in a way the pumpkin never intended, adding a phony seasonal cheer, which the barista, who has made one too many pumpkin lattes, dispenses begrudgingly.