By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
The first time I took my family, including a grandchild, to my favorite Northern Utah pumpkin patch, I suspected the youngest among us would enjoy it. I was surprised, however, when my thirty-something daughter Erin loved it best.
Perhaps Erin loves our favored patch—which is on the grounds of the old Huntsville Trappist monastery—because it has rich family ties. As a boy, I chased cows where the pumpkins now grow, one of many stories from my 2021 book Monastery Mornings.
Yet, I think the real reason may be that loving pumpkins and their patches is part of Erin’s DNA, something in her blood as a fifth generation Irish American.
Pumpkins are a distinctly American invention. A 2018 article in Smithsonian magazine explains how the fruit has had a “surprising trajectory” here.
Wild forms of pumpkins—members of the Cucurbita pepo species—grew in natural abundance in the Americas long before humans arrived. Enormous “mammalian herbivores,” creatures like “giant ground sloths, mastodons and gomphotheres (elephant-like animals),” aided their growth.
When those animals went extinct, the pumpkins survived because the indigenous people planted and cultivated them. Some 500 years ago, arriving Europeans found the squashes everywhere, and Columbus even mentioned them in a journal of his first voyage.
The Native Americans roasted pumpkins, put them into stews, pounded their dried flesh into a powder, and made pumpkin strips into a kind of jerky. Cindy Ott, the author of Pumpkin: the Curious History of an American icon, says the Pilgrims ate pumpkin with the Native Americans during the first Thanksgiving feast, and also probably ate them “the day before, and the day after.”
George Washington even asked his farm manager to mimic the legendary Native American modes of preparation and preservation. It did not work out very well, and Washington could never claim the title as Father of His Country’s Favorite Squash.
Eventually, as people migrated from the country to the city, there was no room to grow pumpkins in urban environments. Left behind, the pumpkin soon became a nostalgic symbol of a bygone life on the farm.
Smithsonian magazine says pumpkin pie first appeared as a recipe in the 1796 cookbook American Cookery, published by a New England writer. Such branding as a specialty from the region where the Mayflower landed helped propel the pumpkin pie onto the Thanksgiving dinner table, arguably one of the most nostalgic holiday meals of the year.
But what about Halloween? It was the Irish who first carved faces into gourds and lit them from within to scare off evil spirits.
After coming to America, Irish immigrants realized that pumpkins served this same purpose quite nicely, thus giving birth to the jack o’lanterns we know today.
My Irish American Catholic mother loved pumpkins. She also found them quite handy in a pinch. Once as a young woman, a Halloween trick or treater shot her in the rear with a pellet gun while she dispensed candy.
More furious than injured, Mom grabbed her nearby pumpkin and crowned him with it. After the fact, she really regretted only the demise of the beloved pumpkin.
Mom passed her pumpkin love on to us, her children, too.
The animated special “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” first aired in October 1966, when I was just five. We watched the premiere and every annual re-run afterwards for several years.
We also carved jack o’lanterns each Halloween. I never warmed up (even as an adult) to scraping out the pumpkin guts, but admiring the carved and glowing candle-lit face afterwards always made the slimy task worthwhile.
These heartwarming traditions have only grown and expanded as I’ve grown up.
For many years, starting in about mid-September, my wife Vicki has populated our front porch with pumpkins, both real and ceramic. Sometimes she adds cornstalk and hay bale flourishes, but pumpkins are the stars of the show.
(Our daughter Erin adopted this decorating habit at her home too, and then some. Her pumpkins have been known to occupy her front porch up through New Year’s Day!)
One year when our children were younger, we planted our own backyard pumpkin vine. It was a shaky agricultural venture, but the vine survived and—the pumpkin gods be thanked—our yield was exactly three small orange gourds, one for each child.
Now older and wiser, we leave the growing to the professionals, and every year travel to the quaint little pumpkin patch on the Historic Monastery Farm near Huntsville. We’ll pick and buy all sizes of the traditional orange pumpkins, of course.
And thanks to Martha Stewart, I now know the names of the other varieties we’ll get too: warty goblin hybrids, flat “Cinderella” stackers, white-gray Jarrahdales, mini Jack-Be-Littles, ghostly white Cotton Candy versions, and multi-colored turban squash.
Maybe a few yellow pumpkin blossoms will linger at the patch when we go too. It’s not really Fall now, until we’ve made the trip.
In his 1915 poem “The Pasture,” the great New England poet Robert Frost invites us all to partake in the simple calming rituals of a more pastoral life:
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
I hope the Pulitzer prize winning poet does not mind too much if, this autumn, I steal and adapt one of his lovely stanzas…
I’m going out to the pumpkin patch.
I’ll watch my daughter skip and dance there,
Carefree in a gourd-shaped world of green, white, and orange.
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
Moderation?