Chapter 18: PumpkinsWe stood around the wooden picnic table in my garage. Three large carving knives gleamed from the newspapers I’d spread on the table. A saw, just in case, and three large spoons for scooping out pumpkin guts lay next to the pumpkins.
Ivan stared skeptically at the display. “What are we doing?”
The pumpkins were large; two were a rare blue and one brilliantly orange. Every year Antonia and I would find the perfect three, then hide them in the garage so no one would see them and try to buy or steal them. Or, thinking of the goblin, eat them. Staring at the pumpkins, memories of planting seeds, poring over the myriad specialty seed catalogs with my mother, Antonia pointing at various colored pictures of multi-hued squash and the conversations about planting schemes all p
