The crooked pumpkin was supposed to earn my seven-year-old a ribbon. Instead, the principal called before lunch and asked what Kylie had put inside it. When I reached the office, its lid was off and my daughter was crying in the next room. Then the principal asked me to sit before she showed me why.
My daughter, Kylie, believes Halloween should last at least six months.
She’s seven.
So when her teacher announced a pumpkin-carving contest, I wasn’t surprised when Kylie came home clutching the permission slip.
“Mommy, we have to win!”
Her teacher announced a pumpkin-carving contest.
She dropped her backpack beside the kitchen table.
“Have to?”
“Yes! The winner gets a ribbon. A real one!”
Every student could bring one decorated pumpkin to school on Monday.
The teachers would choose a winner that afternoon.
“The winner gets a ribbon.”
“Well, we’d better find a good pumpkin,” I said.
Kylie shook her head.
“Not good. The best.”
***
That Saturday, we went to a pumpkin patch outside town.
Kylie inspected nearly every pumpkin.
We went to a pumpkin patch outside town.
She rejected one because it was too round.
Another because its stem looked like a finger.
Then she found a lopsided pumpkin with a flat spot near the bottom.
“This one!”
She found a lopsided pumpkin.
I crouched beside her.
“Are you sure? That side’s a little crooked.”
“That’s why I like it.” She turned it around. “It already looks funny.”
I smiled.
Her father, James, used to choose pumpkins exactly like that.
“It already looks funny.”
He never wanted the smooth, perfect ones.
He liked pumpkins with strange bumps and crooked stems.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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