Oct 11, 2019 3 min read

The pumpkin seekers are out in force.

They come around every weekend – wearing nubby sweaters and plaid flannel in rusty fall colors as they push their baby strollers through jammed parking lots to the hillside where the action happens. Some wait in line for a seat on a flatbed wagon where they will recline against bales of hay, and even writing that sentence made me want to sneeze. At the end of the ride they will jump down into a field dotted with orange, and the seeking will begin.

If there’s a description of this coming weekend in the United States, that was it. An October trip to the pumpkin patch is as much a part of young-family life as a sandy pilgrimage to the beach in July, or the trip to the mall to sit on Santa’s lap in December.

When the kids were small, we did it, too, although as a hay fever sufferer I experienced it as a slurpy ordeal made foggy because of all the allergy medicine required to get through it. And sure, we have the photos of our squishy babies perched atop huge pumpkins that never made it onto the hay wagon for the ride back to the car because they were too heavy to lift.

In the many years since, I’ve come to dread pumpkin-seeking season, because of the gridlock. We happen to live a stone’s throw from a farm that does a big agritainment business every autumn. The traffic begins before lunch on Saturdays; a long line of cars creeps through an already busy intersection and snakes it way into the parking lots that surround the fields. The steady parade of cars moves past the entrance to my neighborhood. Look closely and you’ll see cute kids in the back seats – they’re smiling because they’re about to get a hayride and a pumpkin spice cookie.

I’m not smiling, because I will wait a long time to pull out into that parade, and I hate pumpkin spice anything.

Last Saturday – that warm day filled with golden autumn light – was perfect for a bike ride. I put my bike on the car and headed toward the highway that would take me to my favorite trail. Many hundreds of feet from the intersection, I was stopped cold and then I remembered.

Pumpkin time!

I sat at the intersection for long minutes, as cars pulled in and out from all directions. What normally would take 15 minutes to get to the trailhead took twice that long. Returning home was worse.

“Don’t even think about going anywhere,” I told the farmer as he took my bike off the car when I returned.

“Pumpkin pickers,” he said, grumbly.

We stayed home the rest of the day, and waited until dark to venture out of the neighborhood the next day. We’re at a stage of life where pumpkin picking means grabbing one from the bin at the grocery store and then not carving a face into it, but simply setting it next to the potted mums on the porch.

And even though seeing those kids headed to the hayride brings a small twinge of nostalgia, you will not find me marching in that parade to the pumpkin patch anytime soon. Someday when we have grandchildren, and, man, I hope we do, we’ll be scrambling around those fields finding the perfect gourd to take home and carve up.

But until then, I will watch the traffic jam this weekend and think, selfishly:

Really, October? Must you?