The Pumpkin Patch That Filled a School Bus

I had planted for more than one little boy. I always did.

I sold some at the end of the lane on the honor system, a coffee can nailed to a post, three dollars for the big ones and a dollar for the little. I gave some to the church.

I gave a pickup load to the nursing home in town every year so the residents could paint faces on them. And still every November there were a few hundred left in the field going soft, and Roger would disk them under.

That year I’d counted close to six hundred. A good year. The best in a while, actually, because we’d had rain at the right time in July.

Six hundred pumpkins, and the one little boy I’d grown them for wasn’t coming.

Somewhere around two in the morning I thought about something my mother used to say. When somebody won’t come to your table, she said, you don’t take the table away. You set more places.

I got up and made coffee and waited for it to be a decent hour.

On Monday morning I called the elementary school. I asked the woman in the office if I could leave a message for Mrs. Becker, the first-grade teacher, and she said, “Hang on, hon, she’s on prep, I’ll put you through.”

Mrs. Becker picked up on the second ring. I had met her once at a Christmas program. She has taught first grade in that building for nineteen years, and she has the voice for it, warm and a little hoarse.

“Mrs. Becker, this is Diane Mueller. I’m Brody Mueller’s grandma. We farm out on County D, about six miles north.”

“Oh, sure. Brody’s a peach. Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine. I wanted to ask you something, and you can say no. Do your first graders have a fall field trip this year?”

She was quiet a second. “We used to. We went to the apple orchard every October for years. This year we had to cut it. Between bus costs and admission it came out to almost forty dollars a kid, and a lot of our families just can’t.”

I asked how many children were in the class, and she said twenty-four, which was more or less what I had hoped she would say.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve got about six hundred pumpkins behind my barn, and a husband with a tractor and a hay rack. If you could get them out here, every one of those kids could have a wagon ride and pick a pumpkin to take home. It wouldn’t cost anybody a dime.”

There was a longer quiet then. I thought maybe the line had dropped.

“Are you serious?” she said.

“I’m a farm wife. I don’t joke about pumpkins.”

She laughed, and I liked her right away. Then she got practical, which I liked even better.

She said she’d need the principal’s okay. She said the district had a standing form for farm visits, because the high school ag kids went to dairy farms every spring, and she’d need me to fill it out. She said she’d need a copy of our farm liability insurance.

She said she’d need a hand-washing station, because any time children are around animals or dirt the district requires it.

“No animals in the patch,” I said. “The cattle are on the other side of the road. But I can do hand-washing.”