For many years, a very heavy concrete garden cat stood in the front yard of my parents’ home, surrounded by flowers and shrubs. Every fall, my mother placed a small pumpkin in the cat’s arms.
I don’t know how or why she began doing it. It was simply something I remembered seeing each year when autumn arrived.
When my parents moved, the garden cat came to live with me. The movers warned me that wherever they placed her, she was going to stay. She was much too heavy to move again easily.
I chose a spot in the garden just off my patio, where she could once again be surrounded by flowers and greenery. When fall came, I continued my mother’s tradition and placed a pumpkin in her arms.
That first year, however, I forgot to remove the pumpkin before winter.
By spring, the old pumpkin had begun to deteriorate, so I picked it up and threw it away. I didn’t realize that some of its seeds had apparently fallen into the soil.
Not long afterward, I noticed a mysterious plant growing in the garden. I wasn’t certain what it was, but it didn’t look like a weed, so I left it alone.
The plant continued to grow. Soon, large green leaves appeared, followed by yellow blossoms. That was when I realized I had a pumpkin vine.
And it had no intention of staying neatly inside the flower bed.
The vine grew out into the grass and continued spreading across the lawn. Fortunately, the gentleman who mows my grass recognized what it was and carefully worked around it each week. He enjoyed watching its progress almost as much as I did.
Before long, I found a small pale pumpkin growing beneath the leaves. Then more pumpkins appeared. As the weeks passed, they became much larger than I had expected. These were not tiny decorative pumpkins.
One developed into a large, beautifully ribbed pumpkin with an unusual mixture of orange and green. It wasn’t perfect on one side, but that only made it look more homegrown—and made me even prouder of it.
By fall, I had a pumpkin large enough to place in the garden cat’s arms.
The tradition had come full circle. My mother had begun it years ago with a small pumpkin purchased for her garden cat. Because I forgot to remove one before winter, the cat eventually found herself holding a pumpkin grown from the seeds of that very tradition.
Each fall, I still place a pumpkin in her arms. It reminds me of my mother, her garden and the unexpected things that sometimes grow when we leave a little room for surprises.
When this year’s pumpkins have finished their time in the garden, I’ll save their stems for my decoupage fabric pumpkins. That’s the art teacher in me. We keep everything, convinced we might use it somewhere. If you’ve ever seen the storage room in an art room, you understand.
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