It’s time to put the gardens to bed in Michigan; sunny, 65-degree days notwithstanding. There was frost on the ground again this morning and the low tonight is predicted to be 28. Leaves are being raked and dragged to the turned soil so that they can spend the winter decomposing for whoever is lucky enough to be planting those gardens in the future.

(Author’s aside: Conference calls make me want to poke a hot stick in through one ear and out the other. I’ve been on calls for 5 hours already today. Just so you know. Also, the one I’m on right now? With a corporate attorney. Ehem.)

Annnyyyyywayyyyyyy, when we first moved to “the country”, I was all of 13 years old. We had chickens. Geese. Steer. Eventually a horse. We also had a garden.

A garden to end all gardens. It was more square footage than the entire lot we’d move from in the suburbs.
Row upon row of tomatoes. Cucumbers. Eggplant. Watermelon and cantaloupe. Squash and corn. Kohlrabi, radishes, carrots. And pumpkins.

Like those pumpkins up there.

Every year we’d plant pumpkins in order to decorate the yard in the appropriate Autumn tableaux. An old buckboard wagon in the middle of the front yard was the centerpiece. A scarecrow perched on the seat. Corn stalks arranged in those clumpy-arrangement things that are supposed to look like tepees (ours always fell over and never, EVER looked like we envisioned them). And pumpkins, overflowing from the back of the wagon…some carved into jack-o-lanterns, others left unscathed.

Artistes. That’s what we were.

We kids (my brother The Golden Child was 11, my sister 7), taking direction from my mother, carted those behemoths in a wheelbarrow and somehow lifted them to the wagon bed. I can’t find a picture of the completed wagon, but I can tell you, it was spectacular!

—- Memories don’t lie, right? —-