The Perfect “Ugliest” Pumpkin

As a little girl growing up in the country, Fall was my favorite time of year. The crispness in the air, the panorama of color emerging in the trees, it meant that it soon would be the season of spicy apple cider, cool damp piles of leaves to jump into and my favorite mother-daughter tradition, picking out the perfect pumpkin.

Each year, my mother and I would ride up the windy country road to the big white farmhouse on the hill where Farmer Whitehead and his wife laid out a disordered display of pumpkins in their front yard. Neighbors from all around would park their cars on the side of the road and pile into the yard to survey the display.

And each year, I vowed to myself that I would find the perfect pumpkin. I walked among the horde of pumpkin procurers as we carefully examined our choices, lifting each possibility carefully up by its bottom–never its stem–assessing its aesthetic attributes and carvability.

The pumpkin pickers scrutinized health, color, shape and stem stability, each choosing their version of perfection – tall and thin pumpkins with perfect one-inch apart grooves on blemish-free orange complexions; short, fat, round pumpkins with sturdy thick green stems. One by one they claimed their Fall bounties, left their payments in the cash box on the table and sauntered proudly to their cars.

Maybe it was because I was just a little bit overweight. Maybe it was because I hadn’t yet figured out how to tame my wild curly hair into a human-inspired shape. But, I always had slightly different criteria for the perfect pumpkin.

I appreciated the faultless oval-shaped gourds with symmetrical lines and curled stems reaching decorously upward, but it was the more than slightly imperfect pumpkins that always caught my eye, the unevenly shaped, bumpy textured gourds; the oddly colored brown, green and orange pumpkins with short stumpy stems that I picked over affectionately, carefully inspecting each of their imperfections to find the most unusual, most imperfect, ugliest pumpkin.

My mother and I would make our choices–a couple of pumpkins for carving, one or two to don the front porch. As I rode home, clutching my pumpkin in my lap, the colorful leaves blowing wildly around the country roads, each of them uniquely colored and shaped, I surveyed the beauty of my pumpkin in all its imperfections. Another perfect Fall. Another perfect pumpkin.