On the farm.

After several seasons of pining for a pumpkin farm, I stumbled onto one Sunday while driving through the country. In fact, it was the pumpkin farm that I first visited when I was in Kindergarten, with Ms. Wooten and her daughter Danielle and a couple of other kids from my class. Ms. Wooten had a colossal burgundy Cadillac sort of car with a small black and white t.v. that plugged into the cigarette lighter. I remember being particularly impressed with that.

The woman watching over the pumpkin farm this weekend looked familiar to me. She was on the generous side of middle-age with a gray, bobbed haircut covered by a tan fisherman's hat. She was a healthy, farm weight, and she wore jeans and a barn jacket and a canvas apron and leather boots. I would describe her as farm sophisticate. Her grandchildren would not call her "ma." They would have a more modern name for her.

I told her that I had visited a pumpkin farm when I was in Kindergarten and mentioned the name of the school that I had attended. She replied that the school had been visiting that farm for years and still did. (That's quite a lot of years - at least, 25.)

And, sure enough, there was the big white farmhouse, just to the right and across a meadow where several horses and a donkey grazed on damp grass. And there were the rows and rows of pumpkins, not in a field, as I would have hoped, but arranged neatly by size and price. One row contained pumpkins so mammoth that I could never imagine the man big enough to carry them away. I could live in one like Peter's wife. Miniature pumpkins, small enough to palm, were stacked on wooden shelves that leaned against the deep red barn. And then, of course, there were rows that fell between the two extremes. Perfect orange gourds. Platonic ideals of pumpkins. The stalks were still wet and mushy from the fields.

I had to keep a careful watch over Fain because he has already discovered the joys of pumpkin-chunking. He picked up one tiny pumpkin in his own tiny hand, turned it over to examine it, smiled up at me, and threw it as far as he could. You might be surprised by how far that is.

Aside from the pumpkins, the farm was a small menagerie, designed to educate local elementary school children on farm life. Just like back in the old days. There were white goats poking their heads through the wire gate that enclosed them. Dirty, gray sheep meandered about a pasture behind the red barn, side-stepping several brown cows that chewed cud and stared from beneath a shady pecan tree. There were two gray-and-white rabbits in two separate pens, and neither flinched when Fain reached for them. They must see dozens of sticky-fingered curtain-climbers every day of the week. Four or five rooster, large and the color of burnished copper, iridescent almost, strutted and pecked and cock-a-doodled in another pen. Fain recognized the sound right away, though it is nothing like my poor imitation, and he began to call back to them. How clever. He's already fluent in a foreign tongue. And there was a dark, smoke-colored pig, not squeaky-pink the way that I imagine pigs to be. It shuffled under gray-gold straw, snuffing and squealing. Fain liked him the best.

And as much as he enjoyed himself, as true as it may be that the farm was like heaven for him on this raw, wet, gray day filled with mooing and cawing and squealing and whinnying, it was even better for me.