I’ll be blunt. I dislike autumn, pumpkins, Halloween, cold weather, and the winter holidays. To me, the opportunity to eat turkey and put up a Christmas tree do not in any way compensate for having to put away my sandals.
So when pumpkins appear at the produce stands in September I feel dejected and morose. My dear friend Lila, who celebrates Halloween and actually decorates her yard for the occasion, understands this about me. So a couple of months ago she presented me with a tiny pumpkin from her garden, saying “I thought we’d start small this year.”
I placed the pumpkin on the counter above my stove, and tried to feel a sense of appreciation and love for it. I’m not going to go so far as to say that a miraculous conversion has taken place, but I was just a bit more comfortable with the holiday season this year. I had time on my hands; Apple closed down for a week, so I had another week off from work. I treated myself to fires in the fireplace whenever I felt like it, and went out with Lila to our favorite Indian restaurant several times. And I spent much time ruminating over holidays past.
When I was very small, each Christmas my parents would load my brother, sister, and me into our Ford station wagon and drive from our southern Ohio hometown of Waverly up to my grandmother’s house in Metamora. Mom made a play area for me in the “way back” — no seat belts or child restraints in those days — and I’d play and sing to myself. I don’t know what my brother and sister did in the back seat. Tried to stab each other with forks smuggled from the kitchen, probably.
Memories of Christmas at my grandmother’s house are like a slideshow running in my head. Here’s my dad and my three uncles, exchanging foil-wrapped bottles of whiskey, hamming it up for the home movies. Here’s Mom baking pies (her specialty) in Nana’s kitchen. There’s my sister and me and our three girl cousins, dressed in matching aprons and baking mits made by my mom. And there’s my sister’s dream doll, decked out in a wedding gown designed and sewn by my mom. My, how my sister loved that doll. I removed its hair later in the day, when everyone else was in the dining room.
I can’t help it if these memories seem like something out of the 1950s, because it was the 50s and we were innocent. Well, we were innocent except for the doll hair incident. And I swear, I was just trying to brush and style.
The family singularity, the automobile accident that caused my mom’s brain injury, occurred on December 29th in 1961. That year marks the end of halcyon 50s-style holidays. The slideshow presents darker material. Here are the take-out containers of the “Marriott Hot Shoppes complete turkey dinner,” representing Dad’s thinking that a turkey and cranberries would give us a sense of normalcy. There’s the locked bathroom door; Mom barricaded inside, screaming, sobbing because she knew she was no longer capable of sewing or baking pies. And there’s me, hiding in my room, terrified of my mother’s accident-fueled moods.
It’s hard for a tiny pumpkin, even one from my darling Lila’s garden, to combat that slideshow.
But in the three months that it stood guard on my kitchen counter, till I finally had to discard it because pumpkins, like childhood, don’t last forever, that little gift from Lila must have worked some magic. These days, I’m able to ruminate in peace. I’m not feeling regret and guilt that the good days sped by so quickly. The sad memories don’t seem to hold the same emotional charge.
Maybe the good memories have achieved some sort of critical mass, and now outweigh the bad. My siblings and I created a new tradition of gathering with our children at my brother’s place in Texas every other year. My daughters’ Christmas memories are Texas-infused, and there’s no accident; no singularity. These days all the kids are grown, and we don’t go to Texas anymore, but we do get together with the family of a beautiful friend who knows to give me a tiny pumpkin.
Winter’s not so bad after all. I think I’m going to make it through to sandal weather.
