Happy Halloween to all our readers!  Hope you have a wonderful trick o’ treat weekend after finding just the right face to carve on your pumpkin.  Seeing the following story by Nancy Lammers in The Pine Post, a quarterly literary publication of The Pines at Davidson retirement community, we thought it would be perfect to entertain our readers.  Many of us have grown pumpkins in gardens or seen volunteer vines thrive in our flower beds.  What a treat to have home grown pumpkins to decorate our Halloween table just like the Lammers family.

So a word to the wise:  Compost this year’s jack-o-lantern.  Next spring put your fresh composted soil in your flower beds, and voila! You, too, can experience what Nancy Lammers did!

Even at age 2, Nancy knew a good pumpkin!

AN ORDINARY PUMPKIN by Nancy Lammers

During the Halloween season when our children were growing up, we sometimes took them to a nearby pumpkin patch to choose a pumpkin to carve into a jack-o-lantern. Then until Halloween, our freshly sculpted jack-o-lantern would sit in the center of our kitchen table.   We would eat our meals, staring mesmerized into the pumpkin’s candle-enflamed triangular, eyes, nose, and up-curved smiling mouth.

One Halloween evening, I set our jack-o-lantern on the front porch so our neighbors and any trick-or-treaters could enjoy it also.  But the next morning, when I opened the front door to get the newspaper, I discovered someone had smashed our pumpkin.  Broken pieces of pumpkin shell, the candle, mushy stringy pulp and a few remaining seeds lay scattered across the porch.

We were distressed at this wanton destructiveness, and said to each other, trying to sound like we meant it, “At least Halloween is over now.  At least our jack-o-lantern already has served its purpose.  See how the edges of its eyes and mouth are starting to dry out?  It wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway.”

Still I felt a little sad as I threw the broken pieces of shell in the trash, sloshed a bucket of water on the porch and swept the remaining goop into the shrubbery.  We’d had fun carving that jack-o-lantern and sitting around it while we ate.  It made me mad that someone had destroyed our creation.

The following summer as we packed for a six-week trip to upper state New York, where my husband planned to attend a workshop, I noticed a small vine growing among the shrubs by the front porch.  Had a seed from our smashed pumpkin sprouted?   Or was it a weed?  Might it choke the shrubs?  Should I pull it up?  But then I got distracted with trip matters and promptly forgot all about it.

Nancy has to have a pumpkin on her table when Halloween rolls around!

Late summer, when we finally returned home and drove past the front of our house, we gaped at our yard and house, not believing it. A massive vine with leaves the size of my spread-open hand ran along the front yard, three-fourths the length of our house. Extending from the vine and several feet apart, runners stretched horizontally almost to the street. Various-sized green pumpkins were attached, randomly, to the vine. One runner hung over the edge of the roof and a small green pumpkin rested in the top of a Chinese holly at the far corner of our house. Another runner with pumpkins ran along the front porch.

A neighbor explained that when the person who’d been cutting our grass had asked what he should do about the vine, they had told him just to let it grow.  Apparently, each time he had cut the grass, he had carefully lifted and moved aside each runner, mowed that spot, and then replaced the runner.

After so much expended energy and thought and care, of course, we decided to leave the vine as it was until the pumpkins ripened.  After harvesting the pumpkins, washing them in the bathtub, drying them, and arranging them on our dining room table, we invited the whole neighborhood to a pumpkin party.  At the end of the evening, each person then chose a pumpkin to take home.

Never could we have imagined that one ordinary pumpkin would become the source of so much fun and conversation and community in our small and much-loved neighborhood.

(NOTE:  Nancy Lammers moved to Davidson in 1959 when her late husband, Bill, took a position in the biology department at Davidson College. Her pumpkin story occurred in the 1960s when the family spent six weeks in Lake Placid, NY, while Bill attended a workshop.  At that time the Lammers children, Trina, William and John were 10, 8, and 5 years old respectively.

According to Nancy, she has been putting her pen to paper “forever.”  She took creative writing classes at UNCC some years ago, won a first prize from the Charlotte Writers Club for her work and even won a Children’s Short Story Contest.  Last year Main Street Rag published her book of short stories called “Surf Riding.”  Nancy has lived at The Pines for the past two and one half years.  Many thanks to her for sharing this wonderful Halloween memory.)

Send us your news

Have news for Around Davidson? Write to Brenda Barger at hbarger@bellsouth.net.