Smashed

I must have been 8 or 9 on this particular Halloween. My brother and I spent all afternoon carving pumpkins, scooping out gooey handfuls of pumpkin guts and delicately etching a hillbilly mouthful of teeth and large triangle eyes into their shells. I carefully positioned a tea light inside my rotund pumpkin. I replaced the top that couldn't have fit more perfectly. I left my pumpkin proudly grinning its crooked, sparse-toothed grin on the stairs. As soon as it was dark enough, we lit the candles and left the house to peruse the neighborhood for unattended candy baskets and houses giving out full size bars.

When we returned, I could see from the edge of the driveway that the porch wasn't glowing as it was when we left. And there was something on the sidewalk. As I approached I couldn't believe my eyes. Our pumpkins had been smashed all over the place. The rat bastards. I seriously couldn't understand why someone would want to ruin our perfectly fine jack 'o' lanterns. I cried myself to sleep that night, partly because my belly ached from the sweets I'd consumed, but mostly because all that hard work was for nothing. Or so it felt...

Last year, I experienced it all over again like some kind of repeating nightmare. But this time it was my boys' very first carved pumpkins smashed shamelessly on the street in front of our house. I wanted to shelter them from all the disappointment I felt as a child having worked so hard only to see the fruits of my labor smashed to hell and so we ushered them into the house before they could see what the culprits had done. I know it was all some teenage prank, but I was irate.

The only way I can bring myself to get over it this year is to set our pumpkins out in a proud display again. We will take our time selecting them at the pumpkin patch. We will spend half the day deciding what to carve into them, and the other half doing the carving. We'll probably watch It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown while we decorate sugar cookie bats and witches hats. We will wait until just the right moment at dusk to light the candles inside and leave them side by side on the porch. After all, the whole process is for our enjoyment and no pumpkin smasher will get to take that away from me.