Fairy Tale Pumpkin

This weekend I was at the Dallas Arboretum; for those unfamiliar with the place, it’s a huge, beautiful garden next to an equally gorgeous lake where tons of flowers, trees and shrubs are displayed. Currently, there’s also a breathtaking collection of “chihuly” – sculptural glass works in all shapes and colors. However, the one thing that made the most impression on me was a… pumpkin!

There’s a Pumpkin Patch at the Dallas Arboretum, you see, where they’ve recreated Cinderella. There are houses made of pumpkins (no direct relation to the story, still, fairy tale-like); carriages with horses craved out of shrubs; giant story books featuring key chapters of the legend, and what not. And there it was -- THE Pumpkin – drawing my attention to it because of the namecard displayed next to it: “The Fairy Tale Pumpkin”.

It’s just a normal pumpkin—a real one, grown at the gardens-- but made distinct with its carriage-like shape. And then it hit me, for the first time, that years and years ago,-- “once upon a time”, -- a storyteller might’ve seen a similar pumpkin and spinned the story of a desolate girl and her fairy Godmother who took her magic wand and transformed that mere garden artifact to, voila!, a carriage fit for the castles!

Oh the things we dream up to transform our reality into something magical. As if, we are always trying to escape. As if, we are always wanting more. A hapless girl scrubbing away her stepmother’s home? No problem, let us turn her into a princess! She needs a ride? No problem, a pumpkin is here, this will do, this can become her carriage!

But then, what is life without such invisible magic wands constantly surrounding us? There’s an “ordinary” park that I know of, that which I’ve dubbed my “Enchanted Forest”; there might be nothing special for you to see there – heck, even the “waterfall” there stays dry most of the time, -- you won’t see any magic unless you carry your own magical eyes with you. But, it’s there. It’s there, it’s real, and it’s Enchanted. For me, and for a few others I’ve introduced this “Forest” to, who have embraced its magic in varying degrees, but embrace they have.

You know, they say, in the midst of our ordinary lives, sometimes Life hands you a fairy tale, and that’s called Love. But Love also comes with a lot of mess of its own; and who says it’s only Love that has to be the fairy tale? Sometimes, it’s Friends, Family, a Bicycle Ride!! Why not? Sometimes it’s a combination, and most of the time, it’s just plain YOU. How you see it! Tons of storyspinners must have seen a similar pumpkin before, but there was one who transformed it into a carriage.

And that story lives on. It takes you out of reality, I suppose, and, yes, that can backfire; but maybe somewhere, it also gives you Hope. My mother, for example, she was raised in a Cinderella-like household, and today she is with her Prince Charming (since I’m the daughter, I can’t quite claim she is experiencing “happily ever after” to the fullest though :P ). And, maybe, just maybe, when she was growing up in that household, she’d look out of the window for a Godmother with a Magic Wand, and that would keep her hope alive. The Godmother never came, the pumpkin stayed a pumpkin, but it was that hope, that promise of a fairy tale, that kept her going. And today, she lives that dream: She is my father’s Queen.

~Well, that was a lot of rambling about one silly pumpkin, but hey! I’ve realized I can’t help but be a hopeless romantic, I won’t stop believing in fairy tales (in proper balance, of course); How can I, when I’m surrounded by all these invisible magical wands on a daily basis? And sometimes, maybe all it takes is for a pumpkin to show up on an “ordinary” day to remind me of that enchantment; and maybe, sometimes, that’s all that is needed to transform Life into Magic: a pumpkin… a Fairy Tale Pumpkin.