Eighteen years ago I tried to grow pumpkins for my class. I started my pumpkin project in my own backyard in the summertime long before school started in the fall. Near our back fence, I made four little soil hills in which I planted the seeds and from which came a great tangle of vines. It looked very promising.
However, the great tangle of vines produced only one little yellow flower and not one single pumpkin.
We wrote stories and drew pictures and made books anyway ~ about the pumpkin that never was. This is all that remains of the cover to one of our pumpkin books. Beneath the lamination, you can see the actual vine itself.
I took it to class and we studied it at great length. It was a lovely leafy green, and the flower (lower right-hand quadrant of the cover) was a deep dusty yellow.
Here is a closer view of the little flower. You can just barely make out the faint yellow-brown tint that is left in the petals, petals that were once open, but by the time of lamination, had closed up like a little yellow rosebud.
In a few more years, perhaps, the yellow of the flower and the green of the vine will have become one and the same sepia brown.
I have lost almost everything of my students' work, but I have a few of their drawings of our pumpkin vine. These were the covers for their very scientific descriptions of the vine. (We were studying descriptive writing at the time.)
I love how each cover is different even though you can tell there was an overall direction to make a frame, draw the vine, and include a title and their name. But what I especially love is that you can see that they were working on these together as a class, borrowing ideas from each other. I can see them wandering around the room to see what everyone else was doing, going up to the vine to take a closer look, and then returning to bend over their own work again.
I've been studying these old pictures, and I think now we must have done a brown-crayon frame together as a class, to get them started. Each child has drawn a single-line, brown-crayon frame around the perimeter of the page. Then some of the children decorated the outside edge of the frame and some of them didn't.
This one reminds me of all the times I have misjudged the amount of space it will take me to write something that I fully intended to be centered. I love how Samuel kept on going across the line of the frame to get that fine "e" in place.
And here Shannon sets great bands of colors around an interior that she leaves daringly blank. I love her little yellow-orange flower right in the center at the bottom. I am wondering now if the vine was displayed at the front of the room for them to copy with the little flower in the middle somewhere, for they have all drawn the vine and flower in a very similar way.
And I love Cynthia's title: "The old dead flower and the old dead vine." Really, I'm tempted to write a story with that exact same title.
And speaking of stories, I don't know what happened to the stories that they wrote about "The Pumpkin That Never Was." Perhaps it is appropriate that they are lost, along with the pumpkin, vanished into that sacred place where lost things are kept safe, along with all the things that were ever hoped for but never came to pass.
I am quite sure the pumpkin that never was holds court somewhere, as round and as bright as a harvest moon.
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