By CAY SONNIER GIBSON

October Farewell

Posted October 30, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Filed Under General, Months | 1 Comment

It has been said that October is the most perfect month of the year. Someone corrected me the other day by saying, “Evidently whoever said that doesn’t live in Louisiana.”

Like most of you I’m sick of the rain. Tonight, along with most of my Louisiana neighbors, I am hearing the drip-drop of rain on the rooftop and the sluggish yawn of a late October wind wrap itself into a black shawl. It has rained on my harvest long enough. It even tricked us out of our annual pumpkin farm visit. We planned to go with friends to Anderson Farms in Leesville . I was so eager to write about it and share pictures with all of you, but the trip was canceled due to soaked fields and soggy hay. Some friends trekked later in the week to the Corn Maze at CM Farms in Reeves on the only dry day this month. They had a great time and promised me it was worth the trip. I was glad to hear that. I wiped raindrops off my planner and made notation of this. It’s nice to have my plans already laid-out for next October.

Still, despite the dreariness and drab of the weather, there are measures of autumn bliss in the air if we only reach up and catch it. I have a pumpkin-spice scented candle on my kitchen table and a pot of taco soup warming on the stove. My youngest daughter Annie and I just finished decorating jack-o-lantern faces on our peanut butter cookies for tomorrow’s Halloween gathering with cousins. These are the nice things about autumn. These are the redeeming things about rainy days. cookies

We are also spending this chilly, wet, Louisiana evening waiting for my son to get home with a couple of pumpkins so we can do our traditional pumpkin moonshine. Generally we would never just lob a pumpkin home from the store. We usually go to the pumpkin farm at the beginning of October, carefully select our orange lanterns, and arrange our harvest decor near the front door. We cut our pumpkin moonshines about a week or two before Halloween night and they are nice and moldly and grinning a receding toothline. We have never done the carving the night before All Hallow’s Eve. Horrors! Banish the thought! But busy schedules and abundant rainfall calls for flexibility and being able to constantly alter plans in much the way an insect travels the path of the pumpkin vine. Sometimes it looks as though you’ll never get there.

But it’s all good … really it is. And the jack-o-lanterns are just as mean-ingful. So, let’s dance in the rain and applaud this perfect month of October as it waltzes out into the night … Louisiana-style.

And if you know of any more great pumpkin farms here in Louisiana, please let us all know about them, because next October is only a half-moon away.

pumpkins