The Lane I Lit With Sixty Pumpkins

The Empty Porch

The next morning I drove into town for coffee at the diner on Main, the one by the grain elevator where the booths are the color of butterscotch.

Darlene poured for me without asking and sat down across the way, which she does when she can tell. She has known me since we were girls in the same 4-H club.

“You look like somebody stepped on your garden,” she said.

I told her. The lane, the boo-barn, the spooky in the wrong way. I did not cry about it. I am not much for crying in a diner.

“Eighteen dollars a head,” Darlene said, and she whistled low. “For a corn maze. Lord.”

A man in the next booth, old Earl who farms the quarter section east of me, leaned back without turning around. “My grandkids been three years running,” he said to the ceiling. “There’s no place close to take ’em for free anymore. Used to be every farm on this road lit up. Now it’s that barn or nothing.”

“We used to do the whole road,” Darlene said. “Your place, the Hoffmans, the Kelsos. A kid could walk from one end to the other with a pillowcase and fill it.”

“Hoffmans sold to the builder,” Earl said. “Kelsos moved to town. It’s just Glenda’s lane left, and she’s not even lighting it this year.”

I had not said I was not lighting it. I had only said the boys were not coming. But in Earl’s arithmetic those were the same thing, and I sat there and felt the difference open up in me like a door.

I sat with that. Now it’s that barn or nothing.

I thought about the children in the new houses they are putting up where the Hoffman place used to be, the little vinyl boxes with no trees yet. I thought about where their mothers drive them, because there is nowhere on a country road to walk anymore, no porch light close enough to the next.

I thought, driving home, about my lane. A quarter mile of it. All those fence posts. All that dark that Brittany called the wrong kind.

And somewhere between the diner and my mailbox I stopped feeling sorry and started counting posts.