Note # 56 – On the Trail of the Great Pumpkin

Nine- thirty on the dot, Gavin and I head out the door for his morning constitutional. Overcast, damp, 5C with a just a breath of breeze, still a very good day for a walk. I take in a deep lungful of fresh October air and we set off at our usual brisk pace, only to come to a screeching halt at the end of the driveway.

Those f&%*ing squirrels have dug up and eaten all the bulbs I planted this week.

I spent an entire day digging and depositing these little gems around the foot of a tree and dug a whole bunch of extra beds to accommodate all the snowdrops, crocuses and bluebells that I had lovingly placed in the earth. There was even an accompanying blog post I was set to write about planting bulbs, something like “Spring Blooming Bulbs as a Metaphor for Hope During a Pandemic,” which was going to encourage you, Gentle Reader, to keep hope even as the days get shorter and the Covid numbers go up, because spring will come, this too shall pass and don’t despair.

But now I’m not thinking about hope or spring or bracing pep talks, I’m just steaming mad.

I stomp down the street with Gavin (who is either blithely unaware of my mood or just doesn’t give a fig,) all the while planning elaborate revenge scenarios on the neighbourhood squirrels. (Full disclosure – the squirrels and I have A History. For the past few years, they chewed through four (FOUR!) sets of Christmas lights that I’ve hung <and replaced and hung and replaced> on our back fence. I guess they think the little blue bulbs look like fruit (I mean, how dumb are they?) but I for one, have had it with the squirrels in this neck of the woods.)

Gavin takes a sharp right at the end of our street; we cross the busy four-way stop and head towards the park and I am full on ranting in my head now.

Because – and maybe it’s just me, but perhaps you’ve noticed this too – everything is really terrible right now! So much is wrong in the world and I feel so utterly powerless to affect any of it. Everybody I know is having a rough time of it – cancer treatment, dental surgery, quarantining to stay safe. Jobs have disappeared, people are deeply stressed at work and anyone who is paying even the tiniest bit of attention is pretty worried about the state of the world.

Gavin stops to inspect a fire hydrant – he is very methodical about this and can’t be rushed, so I take a few deep breaths to try to stop the merry-go-round of anger in my head.

And that’s when I see it.

A cutout of a jack-o-lantern, about the size of a dessert plate, taped to the streetlight pole with a generous amount of packing tape. It is so wonderfully, absurdly out of place, it makes me smile.

Then, a hundred feet further on, there is another one, taped to a parking sign, bright orange and looking at me with a goofy pumpkin grin.

We walk on. There are lots more – taped to trees, signs, poles – every few hundred feet, we see one and in spite of the tempest in my head, they make me smile. We carry on with our walk, do a big loop of the park, visit with the Canada geese, then circle back towards home.

We’re in the homestretch when I spot them, a block away. A woman leading a tiny gaggle of children, none of them more than three years old. They are wearing their Hallowe’en costumes over their winter clothes and are trundling along the sidewalk like little drunken sailors. One of them spots the next pumpkin and squeals, and they all rush forward to point at it. The woman, who is pulling a wagon along with them, stops, reaches into a bag in the wagon, hands them each something. The grey morning is filled with the sound of tiny plastic whistles. At the next stop, it’s little chocolate bars which they all carefully deposit in their plastic pumpkins and then they set off down the sidewalk, on the trail of the next pumpkin.

The rest of the way home, I think about this woman who runs this neighbourhood daycare, walking up and down the dark streets this morning, taping up these pumpkins for her little charges to discover, giving them a tiny adventure during these Definitely Not Normal Times.

Maybe we will be okay.

P.

P.S. But I’m still mad at the squirrels…