Out of Season

Out of season

There were pumpkin seeds in the oven, scattered across the thin sheet of foil atop a stained cookie sheet. Cookie was a misnomer given the sprinkled savory toppings, but we’d sometimes made cookies there too.

We’d spent the afternoon scooping spoonfuls of orange flesh out from our plump pumpkins. Before that, we’d gone to the patch, full of hay bales and enough squash orbs that we’d each gotten to pick out our perfect prize.

Mine was round with a squat stem. Its back was flattened in a way that had only become obvious or important as I’d begun to draw in its triangular eyes and gaping toothy mouth. We’d each sketch a simple grimace and with a sharpened saw-tooth knife carve out the corresponding shapes, pushing firmly against them until they fell into the cavernous interiors of our pumpkins.

There was nothing quite so gratifying as placing a single tea light onto the base of the belly, still wet and rough from its gutting and watching the smile shine brightly from the covered darkness of our patio.

There was nothing scary about Irvine.

It was the 7th safest city in the nation and yet there were ways to fear the harm caused by human hands. Sure, there were pumpkin seeds, roasted, and salted, and sprayed down with Pam as simple savory snacks, but there were risks that came with Halloween and being human as well.

Perhaps I mean the danger of the blade for pumpkin piercing, or the risk of burning one’s own wee fingers when we dropped the brightly lit wick and flame into the jack-o-lantern’s open head, but other concerns were so much more vague and therefore ominous.

The two of us, dressed as witches, were in such contrast to the whispers of evil that it never occurred to me how strange it was to spend hours sifting through our candy procured from friendly neighbors looking for open corners, and poison, and razor blades.

It was uncomfortable to perch there for so long in the fabric of our matching costumes, hand sewn and carefully matched to twin brooms, one teal and one orange.

How I wished they could fly. How I longed for real risk - beyond the evenly cropped rows of hedges and the evenly trimmed front yard lawns.

How alluring excitement felt to me - even the darkest kind.

It was a craving for tumult I would chase in my adult life through the rich experiences of safe scares, tethered to a rock wall, zip-lining over a cloud forest, or legs dangling over a crowd of tarantulas in a rural bar in the Cuban countryside.

Still, I see now why you’d introduce risk in a place like a sprawling So Cal suburb, one that was still expanding like water bubbling up over the edges of a loosely lidded pot. There was so much safety it was important that there was also danger everywhere, for the thrill of it perhaps.

The corresponding comfort of the crisp delectable pumpkin seeds could only serve as a serving of fear's antidote.

Not love exactly, but familiarity, and such saltiness. So craveable.

It’s the kind of small sensory experience one doesn’t grow from, or need to, although each seed has the potential to inspire at least a dozen more pumpkin carving parties on the tips of its vine.

It’s so silly; all this eaten, rather than grown, potential.

And yet perhaps scariest to devour what life has to offer - to make up and tell stories about what was and could have been, both good and bad - and to spend time and words revelling in that delectable pumpkin seed smell, wafting through our home in October in Irvine.