The Patch

Since our favorite pumpkin patch decided to close two years ago after twenty consecutive years of family visits, I’ve had a hard time developing a new gourd-growing relationship. I’ve tried new patches and even gave growing my own pumpkins a shot (with no success). Last year, for the first time in my kids’ lives, I didn’t even have the heart to try taking them to a replacement patch. I just couldn’t do it. And now I have guilt over that. Aargh. I liked the old pumpkin patch and I don’t like change. Bad combination when the place you’re used to hangs up their vines and quits. So, not wanting to experience more didn’t-give-my-child-pumpkin-patch-memories angst, I started looking for a new place to get the pumpkins we don’t actually carve, just leave hanging around the porch until they get gross and “disappear.” Coincidentally, I saw a flyer a few months ago advertising a farm tended by a local high school and pinned it to the bulletin board in the kitchen--where I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it until Halloween loomed mere moments away. The ad promised a “tractor exhibit” and “harvest games” along with “cranberry beans” to go with your plain old pumpkins. So, we went. Where we experienced “nature.“ And Scarlett and Keilana pretended to barf over the pumpkin guts splattered on the ground. Good times. In Norman Stiles Farmer Grover, the blue muppet spends a day on the farm doing gross stuff. But he doesn’t barf.

http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Farmer_Grover_%28book%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Stiles

E-I-E-I-O

In my first year of college at Cal State Los Angeles, some kitchen mishap made our dorm apartment reek. As we opened the windows to get rid of the stench, I sputtered something about the smell being worse than a skunk. One of my roommates, a born and bred Angeleno, gasped back that she wouldn’t know because she had never smelled a skunk. Even having been metropolitan-born myself, I could not believe such a thing. Never smelled a skunk? Ever? To what do you compare all bad smells (other than Long Beach)? And then it got more bizarre: she’d never seen a cow either. My mind still reels all these years later. This young woman had reached pre-med student adulthood but had never been to a petting zoo, for heaven’s sake? How is this possible? My kids have been very fortunate that they have always had a local working farm and pumpkin patch to visit where they experience the animals, from newborn to retired, up close and personal. The farm shut down as a public entity this year, but I have twenty years worth of petting, feeding, and hay riding pictures as proof that I at least tried to broaden their suburban horizons. Annie North Bedford’s The Jolly Barnyard shows an idyllic picture of farm animals brainstorming what contributions they can make to the farmer’s birthday celebration. Maybe there’s some rich Southern California doctor that would pay for them to take their show on the road to the inner city.

http://www.amazon.com/Jolly-Barnyard-Little-Golden-Book/dp/0375828427

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/585620.Annie_North_Bedford