Halloween: Night of the Unexpected

An electrical line runs diagonally across my property, powering the house next door. It aerially bisects my stone patio, and thus offers an indispensable clue as to the origins of the errant trio of unusually colored chrysanthemums—coral, lavender, and melon—that appeared just below between rocks. A bird, perching on the wire after a delectable feast, deposited its waste, and voila! A veritable visual treat, an imagined aural amusement, a string trio in C minor—the key of heroic struggle.

I haven’t the heart to silence that little trio, but will, next spring (should they survive the winter) transplant them to more appropriate places in the garden.

My intended action comes as an assault on the unintentional, which is what gardening is (try though many gardeners do to produce a verifiable naturalism). And that is why, I think, we should delight in the chance occurrences in the garden.

So imagine my surprise each day when I spy a new arrangement, another appearance of that quintessential Halloween accoutrement: the pumpkin.

This pumpkin, however, did not sprout from a seed—at least not the kind that one plants in the ground(!).  Very much like the untied statues of Daedalus, this pumpkin moves about.

Our pumpkin, of course, could never be tethered. He, like the seeds of the chrysanthemum, appears where he must, and flourishes where he will. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Happy Halloween!