The Lane I Lit With Sixty Pumpkins

The Whole Town Came

On Halloween I started at four o’clock, before dusk, because sixty candles is a lot of matches and my knees are not fast.

I went post to post with the long lighter, the kind you use for a grill, and I lit them one at a time down the west side and up the east side, and as the light went blue and then deep blue the lane came up out of the dark like something remembering itself.

I stood at the county road end and looked back up toward the house and I will tell you my breath caught. Sixty faces glowing orange, the gravel gold between them, my porch light small and warm at the top, and the field dark and quiet all around.

I had made a long yellow candy bowl ready on a hay bale by the porch, three bags of the good chocolate, not the cheap kind, because I had saved for it. I did not expect to need three bags. I thought maybe Earl’s grandkids would come. I thought maybe the Yoder boy would bring his sister’s children.

The first car turned in at ten after six. I did not know them. A young mother, two little ones in the back, a ladybug and a skeleton. She rolled her window down at the foot of the lane and just looked up it.

“Is this real?” she called. “Can we? Someone at the diner said a farm out this way lit up.”

“Come on up, honey,” I called back. “Come slow and let them look.”

She came slow. And behind her another set of headlights turned in off the county road. And behind that, another.

The ladybug got out at the top and stood with her thumb in her mouth, staring, and her mother crouched down beside her and said see, baby, pumpkins, somebody carved all these pumpkins just for you.