JavaJennifer

Every year around this time, this trite littel internet piece makes it’s way around unsuspecting email addresses about how we are all God’s pumpkins, some of us with warts, some misshapen but all of us a treasure, blah, blah, blahtty, blah-blah.  God scoops out the gook in all of us, the seeds of greed, shoves a light up our asses so we can light the world.

Let me tell you a little something about pumkins.

 

Those fuckers are heavy. 

And they require constant attention.  If they sit on one side too long, the condensation collects and turns them mush.  So you have turn them.  Daily.  Every night when I leave the patch I both hope that they’ll be stolen so that I don’t have as many to sell and then, I hope they don’t get stolen so that we can sell more and make money.  Last night Tee-Oh, a fellow patch worker suggested that we blow them up which would efficiently distribute the seeds so that we could grow our own pumpkins next year. 

I’m not ruling it out.

And despite thier heaft, pumpkins are surprisingly fragile.  If you lift them by the stems, they break.   Actually, if you look at the stems, they break.  And lemme just say this:  no one wants a pumpkin without a stem.  Not even God.   I’ve had people walk up to me cash in hand, pumpkin by the stem when the stem snaps off sending the pumpkin to the ground with a thud big surprise, they don’t want that pumpkin anymore.

While not an inherrent part of the rodent diet, the racoons, squirrels and rats of Arlington County nibble a little bit out of 10 or more pumpkins every night- this- even though we have an actual squirrel patch not more then 10 feet away from the big patch specifically to discourage this.  Rat bastards don’t care.  And yours truly is up to her elbows in regurgitated pumpkin schmeg cleaning up after the rats.  And you know how I feel about rats. 

You can tell a lot about a person by the way the choose thier pumpkins.  The reality is that each person wants a perfect pumpkin with symetry… not unlike they way they choose symetry in a mate.  The pumpkin shouldn’t be to tall, too orange (TOO ORANGE???) or, God forbid, too fat.  The pumpkin can’t have any scars, any blemishes or any warts.  These people arE un-dateable. 

I’ve been asked over and over again if I knew that the patch would be this much work.  Hell no, I didn’t.  And it’s a good thing because if I’d known, there’s no way I would have signed up for it.  Which would have been unfortunate.

Because just as a handful of people have been rooting for me to fail, I’ve taken hundreds of pictures of families who say that our patch is the best they’ve been to.  In my way, I’ve been able to reach out to the otherwise unchurched community.  It has stretched me in ways I could not have predicted and I’m grateful that God chose me for this.

Tags:

This entry was posted by javajennifer admins on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 11:10 am and is filed under Blog Blend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.