Openings

At last it is October.  The colors are here, the fall is here, Samhain and Halloween are coming with Thanksgiving to follow, and with these come pumpkins.

Pumpkins are squash, with tasty seeds and tasty flesh and an efficient enough shape to render carving worthwhile.  Efficiency, in this case, is measured in proportion of volume to exterior dimensions, with more being better.  While it is possible to grow a zucchini with roughly the same mass as a medium-sized pie pumpkin, it is much harder to make a jack o’ lantern out of it.  Acorn squash fares somewhat better, but pumpkins hold pride of place for a reason: they are good.  Their plumpness suggests plenty; their flesh is succulent roasted or stewed, they keep well, and one’s hands fit nicely inside the top, if one begins with a suitable lid.

I did not always know this.

I grew up in suburbia, and as far as I knew, pumpkins were for carving.  It was years before I knew you could eat one.  You could eat the seeds if you didn’t burn them, but I had no idea that jack o’ lanterns were made of food.  Eventually I did connect pumpkin pie with the glowing orange heads on every doorstep, but I was in college before I took a round, orange squash, cut a lid and hollowed it out, and then replaced the lid and put it in the oven.  Living in small town Minnesota was like living in a perpetual magic show, or a living history museum–things I had only read in books, things I thought were gone forever, were still part of life.  The shopkeepers knew me.  The bank teller knew me.  I walked to get groceries, to the fellowship on Sundays, to the general store where Mr. Jacobsen had run Jacobsen’s since time began, and where his son was running the store with him.  We were an hour from the Mall of America, but we might as well have been on a different planet.

It was a transformative planet.  It got into your very bones and soul.  It changed the way you looked at things and how fast the world spun by.  When I went there I said I wanted to experience a different one of our country’s many cultures.  And so I did.  That change has impacted the whole rest of my life.  Before that I knew nothing but the fast-paced world of New York’s suburbs.  Everything had to happen yesterday or sooner; everyone had to fend for themselves; life was entirely anonymous; work was a necessary evil; automation was good; all recreation was expensive.

Life in Northfield couldn’t have been more different.  My college certainly allowed us to stay high-strung if that was what we wanted, but I was on a cultural immersion experience and I was determined to be immersed.  Some small towns with colleges isolate the school, reject the students, regard the whole thing as a kind of parasitic growth.  All the determination in the world would have been useless if the town itself hadn’t embraced us, but we were lucky–Northfield was never like that.  My fellow students showed me how to be at college, but it was the townspeople themselves that showed me how to be part of the town.  The lady who ran one of the antique shops always said, “Thank you,” and “goodbye” when I left, and so I learned to say goodbye when I left a store.  The bank manager taught me to write checks and so I learned that I could ask strangers for help.  The UU fellowship jumped at the possibility of a young person in their midst, and thus I learned to set boundaries.  And the beloved man who ran the math tutoring center on campus also owned one of the grocery stores in town, and it was therefore clear how interconnected a small town really is.  In four years there I learned as much about community and grace as I did about English literature or educational theory in classrooms and on campus.

But I could not have learned it without that remarkable openness of a town that welcomed strangers into its midst, strangers who came at the remarkable rate of six or seven hundred a[...]