A Permanent Memory

This costume was obviously not my idea.

In the days leading up to Halloween, my older sister and I would stand at my father's workbench in the cold garage wielding pens and serrated knives, considering the large orange canvases in front of us. We would cut a hole in the top (mine was inevitably so small that it was hard to maneuver the guts out) and perform some emergency surgery on our unsuspecting patients, removing seeds and slime, scraping the sides with the edge of a spoon, trying to get it just perfect so that no stringiness remained.

The smell of this process is something that I believe you never forget, and since memory is so often tied to smell, you never forget what it is like to carve pumpkins. These pumpkins had been on the porch for at least a week or so before carving, and were thus practically frozen. Our hands and arms, almost up to the elbows in pumpkin guts, would similarly freeze. The guts dried a bit on our arms to create that most unique of sensations as the hair on our arms was pulled and tugged and our skin felt like I imagined an old person's did.

I don't know about Alison, but my pumpkin never turned out as glorious as it was in my mind. The pen would slip in the grooves of the pumpkin or the knife would not glide as smoothly as needed and suddenly it looked as if my pumpkin had just had a stroke. Always a small disappointment.

A few minutes ago I was at my kitchen counter de-gutting our three pumpkins so that we could carve them later tonight. It's not quite the same doing it in a warm, well-lit kitchen. There's something about standing in a long-sleeved t-shirt, the sleeves pushed up beyond your elbows, and feeling that your fingers did not enjoy their full range of motion because something like rigor mortis was setting in that really puts you in the mood for Halloween.

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