It's that season. Have you been to the pumpkin patch yet? In my stellar academic and non-existent athletic career, I can claim one trophy. I received a small trophy in the third grade for a poem I wrote about a Jack-O-Lantern. I'm sure my mom kept it-somewhere. I remember one part........something about scooping its brains out and putting them in a cup. Good stuff.
My grampa grew some big pumpkins, due in large part to the horse manure additive. We kids would get to go to his truckpatch (that's a large garden in Indiana), pick out a couple pumpkins and carve them up. My folks try to carry on the tradition with our kids.....however, in the last year or two the pumpkin crop has been anything but productive so several mysterious pumpkins show up in the fields for the grandkid's fall party. No vines in sight.
Something about a good pumpkin and picking out just the right one. Makes even us 39 year olds feel like a kid again. Without the attempt to put it on my own head......won't do that again.
2 comments:
I think that truckpatch that you refer to is a garden from which produce is "trucked" to town for sale to the "city folk" who didn't have gardens. It could be at a formal farmers market or from the back of the pick up truck on street corners or peddled slowly along neighborhood streets. Most large cities in the midwest Chicago,St.Louis,Milwaukee were ringed by small plots that were called truck farms, there may be no buildings just very large gardens that were tended by a "farmer" those were the days before interstate highways and produce shipped in from Brazil. Now those fields are office parks and strip malls!
Ahhh, I assumed that was the origin of the term. Then it was indeed a "truckpatch" because he loaded up crates and bushel baskets of produce on the back of his truck and would let us kids sell them out in front of the truckstop. Thanks for the clarification.
Hoosier Reborn
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