This weekend, once we determined that I was safely ambulatory, we took The Boy and The Girl pumpkin picking. We have a little song that goes with it – picky the pumpky, the pumpky the picky – and a ritual we follow every year.
We pick a weekend in mid- to late-October and make the trek to a working farm near the condo in which The Wife and I lived when we first got married. The farm makes most of its money from a sort of farm tourism, rather than, say, crops or livestock. It has a large pumpkin patch, and it offers hayrides out to the patch on big rickety metal carts with haybales for seats, pulled by huge tractors. Hayride tickets are four bucks a pop. Then we disembark in the patch and, using a top-secret algorithm which I am not at liberty to disclose, pick the two best pumpkins. We catch another hayride back, whereupon we get the pumpkins weighed and pay for them. (No, the pumpkins aren't included in the hayride price. Did I mention it's a revenue builder?) There's also a hay maze, a few cute props for photos with the kids, and lots of food and knickknacks for sale. (Did I mention it's a revenue raiser?)
It's a fun outing, and this year was particularly good because it wasn't too wet or too cold. (There have been years in which each step in the pumpkin patch landed with a disheartening squish.) The jury is still out on whether The Girl will let her pumpkin be carved; when he was her age, The Boy wouldn't let me come near his pumpkin with the knife, for fear of hurting it.
The Critical Thinking Academic in me sees all sorts of issues with the pumpkin ritual. If farms in this area have become, economically speaking, more about entertainment than about food,* then why are they entitled to such dramatically preferential property tax treatment? Or subsidies? And what's with the romanticization of the rustic in the first place? The guy taking tickets at the hayride stand was in communication with the tractor drivers via cell phone. Is that how our ancestors did it? Is it really important for The Boy and The Girl to experience farm life, given that we're several generations removed from it? Wasn't the point of the twentieth century to liberate us from farm life? Besides, why do we automatically give cultural deference to people who accept staggeringly huge public subsidies, and then vote Republican to get tough on welfare? Who do these people think they are? Isn't the whole 'open space' fetish really just a way to keep low-income people out of the suburbs? A few years ago the teenager taking tickets was reading one of the Left Behind novels. I'm supposed to defer to that? Since when does mucking around in manure convey deep insight? Wouldn't the first insight be “I don't like mucking around in manure”? That was certainly my experience with the ice factory.
But then I tell my Critical Thinking Academic side to take a deep breath and put a sock in it. The hayride is fun, being outdoors with the kids is a blast, the kids LOVE picking their own pumpkins, the people-watching is outstanding (this year's highlights: an 80-ish year old woman who sounded like she spent the last 75 years ingesting nothing but cigarettes and whiskey, yelling “toodles!”; and a young boy holding up a piece of hay and announcing proudly “this is wheat. It's what corn comes from!”), the parts of the farm that don't smell like manure smell good, and there's something fun about an annual tradition. TB and TG, I hope, will remember the picky the pumpky trips fondly as they get older. There's something to be said for historical continuity, even if you sometimes have to choose not to look too deeply into the hay maze.
* Eventually, most of the fields yield clusters of four-bedroom colonials arranged around cul-de-sacs, which I believe is French for 'crop circles.'
