The Lane I Lit With Sixty Pumpkins

Too Dark And Spooky

I want to be fair to Brittany, because my late husband Ray always said you lose an argument the second you stop being fair.

She grew up in a subdivision outside Columbus where the houses stand close and the porch lights come on all at once at dusk like the whole street agreed on it.

Trick-or-treat there is a river of children under the streetlights, costumes bright, every doorbell two steps from the last. That was her Halloween, and it was a good one, and I never once said a word against it.

My Halloween was different. Out here the dark is real dark. The lane runs long and the corn, what’s left of it in late October, whispers when the wind comes across the field.

I lit it the old way. Candles in jars on the fence posts. A pumpkin or two on the porch rail with a stub of candle guttering inside. The boys loved it when they were small, the way children love a thing that is a little bit frightening when a grandmother’s hand is right there to hold.

When Mason was four he made me carry him up the lane on my hip the whole quarter mile, and he kept his face in my collar the whole way, and when we got to the porch he lifted his head and said do it again.

We did it again. Four times, until my arms gave out. That is the sort of thing that makes a lane worth a quarter mile of dark.

“It’s just dated, Glenda,” Brittany said on the phone. “I’m sorry. We want to make new memories. Nicer ones.”

Nicer. I turned that word over while she talked.

She told me about a place across the county, a boo-barn they called it, out past the fairgrounds. Hay maze, a corn cannon, cider stand, a fellow in a mask with a chainsaw that had no chain in it so no one got hurt.

“It’s eighteen dollars a head,” she said, and she said it proud, like the price was part of what made it nice. “Mason has been begging. Trey too. They’ve seen the videos.”

Mason is ten and Trey is eight. I have had them both since the afternoon they were born, Mason in a storm that took the power out, Trey on a Sunday so quiet you could hear the clock.

Eighteen dollars a head, I thought. Fifty-four dollars for the three of them, before the cider and the pie slice and whatever a boy begs for at a stand lit up like a carnival.

I have carved pumpkins on this farm for free since Eisenhower. But I have learned that you cannot tell a young mother that a thing is better for being free. To her, free is what you settle for.

“Of course,” I said. “You take them and have a wonderful time.”

What else does a grandmother say. There is no form to fill out that makes you more than the mother. Brittany is their mother. The boys go where she drives them. I learned that rule a long time ago and I have never once found the edge of it.