Me and My Pumpkin
Grandpa and Stacey were carving the Halloween pumpkin together. Grandpa’s mind went back to a time when he was younger, much younger, when he was standing beside his Grandpa, carving the Halloween pumpkin.
“You know Stacey,” said Grandpa. “I remember standing beside my Grandpa carving our Halloween pumpkin.”
“You do?” asked Stacey.
“Yes,” said Grandpa. “I may be old but I can still remember a lot of things and I do sure remember me and my pumpkin.”
Stacey laughed.
“One year, I think I was seven years old,” said Grandpa. “I had spent the whole summer watching my pumpkin grow. Many days it was just me and my pumpkin in the pumpkin patch. I even fed it myself and it grew and grew and grew. It was the biggest pumpkin in our pumpkin patch.”
“You had a pumpkin patch,” said Stacey, her eyes wide as saucers.
“Yes,” said Grandpa. “Remember, your Great Grandma and Grandpa had a farm and my Grandpa, who would be your Great, Great Grandpa was staying with us at the time.”
“I do remember,” said Stacey. “You took me there one time.”
“Yes,” said Grandpa. “I did, didn’t I. Anyway, back to my pumpkin story. My pumpkin was so big by the end of the summer that Great Grandpa had to help me lift it into the wheel barrow and lift it from the wheel barrow to our front porch. That is where we carved him.”
“Gee Grandpa,” said Stacey. “It must have been pretty big because I know you are very strong.”
“Oh,” laughed Grandpa. “It was big. It weighed over 50 pounds. That is five sacks of potatoes.”
“Wow!” exclaimed Stacey.
“Yeah, Grandpa was impressed,” said Grandpa. “He actually wanted me to enter the pumpkin in the fair that year. He said I would have won first prize.”
“You should have,” said Stacey. “What was first prize, anyway?”
“Well it was just a ribbon at that time,” said Grandpa. “But I didn’t want to enter it. I wanted my pumpkin to be my Halloween pumpkin. I wanted to impress my friends when they came over trick-or-treating.”
“I see,” said Stacey. “But you would have won first prize, Grandpa.”
“Oh but in a way,” said Grandpa, smiling. “I did win first prize that night.”
“What?” asked Stacey, now confused.
“Well,” said Grandpa. “There was a little girl that came trick-or-treating at my door that night and she was the sweetest little girl there ever was. I ended up falling in love with that little girl and ten years later, we were married.”
“Gee,” said Stacey. “Then that little girl must have been Grandma.”
“Yes indeed,” said Grandpa. “It was your Grandma. She came right up to me and said that she thought my pumpkin was the best looking pumpkin on the whole road. She wasn’t going to bother trick-or-treating at my house because it was so far away but she said that my pumpkin glowed so bright from the road that she just had to come and see it.”
“So it was your pumpkin that brought you and Grandma together,” said Stacey.
“Yes,” said Grandpa, blushing. “It was and she was just as beautiful that day as you are beautiful now.”
“Thank you,” said Stacey, blushing too.
Stacey and Grandpa put a candle in the pumpkin that they had just finished carving.
“That’s a nice pumpkin,” said Grandpa, looking at it.
“Yes,” laughed Stacey. “It is.”
Grandma came out on the porch with some cookies and milk for Grandpa and Stacey and stood looking at the pumpkin with a smile on her face. Both Grandpa and Stacey knew that Grandma was thinking about the time that she first met Grandpa and both smiled back at each other.
Moral of this Story:
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