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By Root 880 0

art is an earnest form of self-expression here. Autumn, with its blended undertones of “joyful harvest” and “Trickor-Treat kitsch,” brings out the best and worst on the front lawns: colorful displays of chrysanthemums and gourds. A large round hay bale with someone’s legs hanging out of its middle. (A pair of jeans and boots stuffed with newspaper, I can only hope; we’ll call it a farm safety reminder.) One common theme runs through all these dioramas, and that is the venerable pumpkin. They were lined up in rows, burnished and proud and conspicuous, the big brass buttons on the uniform of our village. On the drive home from our morning’s errands we even passed a pumpkin field where an old man and a younger one worked together to harvest their crop, passing up the orange globes and stacking them on the truck bed to haul to market. We’d driven right into a Norman Rockwell painting.

Every dog has its day, and even the lowly squash finally gets its month. We may revile zucchini in July, but in October we crown its portly orange cousin the King Cucurbit and Doorstop Supreme. In Italy I had nursed a growing dread that my own country’s food lore had gone over entirely to the cellophane side. Now my heart was buoyed. Here was an actual, healthy, native North American vegetable, non-shrink-wrapped, locally grown, and in season, sitting in state on everybody’s porch.

The little devil on my shoulder whispered, “Oh yeah? You think people actually know it’s edible?”

The angel on the other shoulder declared “Yeah” (too smugly for an angel, probably), the very next morning. For I opened our local paper to the food section and found a colorful two-page spread under the headline “Pumpkin Possibilities.” Pumpkin Curry Soup, Pumpkin Satay! The food writer urged us to think past pie and really dig into this vitamin-rich vegetable. I was excited. We’d grown three kinds of pumpkins that were now lodged in our root cellar and piled on the back steps. I was planning a special meal for a family gathering on the weekend. I turned a page to find the recipes.

As I looked them over, Devil sneered at Angel and kicked butt. Every single recipe started with the same ingredient: “1 can (15 oz) pumpkin.”

I could see the shopping lists now:

1 can pumpkin (for curry soup)

1 of those big orangey things (for doorstep).

Come on, people. Doesn’t anybody remember how to take a big old knife, whack open a pumpkin, scrape out the seeds, and bake it? We can carve a face onto it, but can’t draw and quarter it? Are we not a nation known worldwide for our cultural zest for blowing up flesh, on movie and video screens and/or armed conflict? Are we in actual fact too squeamish to stab a large knife into a pumpkin? Wait till our enemies find out.

Two days later my mother walked in the kitchen door, catching me in the act of just such a murder, and declared “Barbara! That looks dangerous.”

I studied my situation objectively: the pumpkin was bluish (not from asphyxiation) but clinging tenaciously to life. I was using a truly enormous butcher knife, but keeping my fingers out of harm’s way. “Mom, this is safe,” I insisted. “I have good knife skills.”

Where her direct descendants are concerned, my mother’s opinion is that a person is never too old to lose digits or eyesight in the normal course of events.

Dad is another story. To be frank, he’s the reason Mom’s worry-skills remain acutely honed. Naturally he wanted to get in on the act here. “Step right up!” I said. My father’s career, before he retired, covered most kinds of emergency surgery imagined in the twentieth century, carried out in operating rooms that occasionally did not come equipped with electricity. I wasn’t going to argue with his knife skills.

The pumpkin kept the two of us sawing and sweating for a good thirty minutes while we made no appreciable progress. Our victim was a really large pumpkin of the variety called Queensland Blue. The seed catalog had lured me in with testimonials about its handsome, broad-shouldered Aussie physique and tasty yellow flesh. Next year, Amadeo’s warty Zucche