The Frost is on the Pumpkin

I grew up over a woodshop. My father was a carpenter and cabinetmaker and his shop was on the ground floor of our house. There was a huge furnace in the shop and he burned the scraps from the cabinets he made, along with locally mined coal, through the winter. On cold mornings he would get up early and go downstairs to fix the fire. My mother and some of us would be in the kitchen listening to the rattling and clanking of the furnace as she made coffee, baked the bread she had set to raise, and her famous cinnamon rolls. Soon the house would smell like woodsmoke and coffee and baking bread and cinnamon–-it was a fragrant childhood.

My father would come upstairs saying, “Oh boy, the frost is on the pumpkin today!” I asked him what that meant one time and he said I should look it up. That was a favorite phrase of both my parents’s–-“go look it up”. Our living room, which my father had paneled with one of the last lots of wormy chestnut milled after the great chestnut blight of some years earlier, was filled with encyclopedias and reference books. Our whole house was filled with books.

“It’s a poem by James Whitcomb Riley,” I told him after having looked it up.

“That’s right,” he said, “When the frost is on the pumpkin and the lumber's in the shop, And you hear the cluck and gobble of the strutting turkey-cock, And the clacking of the guineys, and the clucking of the hens, And the rooster's hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence; O, it's then the time a feller is a-feeling at his best, With the rising sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest, As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock, When the frost is on the pumpkin and the lumber's in the shop.”

He had learned the poem as a boy and never forgot it though he was apt to change the words as it suited him. It was years before I knew the correct words were "the fodder's in the schock" instead of the lumber's in the shop".

Both of my parents were interesting people. People who, if they lived today and had not grown up in a small highland town, would have led lives very different from the ones they did, I think. They were both extremely intelligent, valued learning, appreciated beauty, were fiercely passionate in their approach to life, and, though they were very bad at expressing it, loved each other. Over the years I have thought about their relationship a lot. There was plenty of fighting and hollering in our house at times. Many years later I was reading Sam Keen’s A Fire in the Belly, he spoke of marital fights as an expression of “the fierceness of love”. When I read that phrase I began to understand my parents for the first time in my life.

My mother bore and raised eight children. She loved to bake and to can fruits and vegetables–-to make relishes and preserves. Yet, she told me that she wasn’t sure being married and a mother was the best way to spend your life. She was proud of me for staying single, travelling, pursuing a career. She lived a little vicariously through my independence. She had great, great dignity–-a quality of hers it has taken me years to appreciate. Both of my parents had that quality and it was a thing they valued in their children. In a fashion true to my origins, I looked-it-up.

“Dignity: The quality or state of being worthy of esteem or respect. Inherent nobility and worth. Poise and self-respect.”

I have been thinking a lot about my parents and the gifts they gave me. It is a good time to think about that and to be grateful, to give thanks for those blessings. My father taught me to see the beauty of the world, to value learning and creativity. My mother taught me that independence was a blessing and something to be proud of. Both of them gave me a sense of my own worth and the dignity to rise above, pursue my dreams, and not let the soul-killers and dream-destroyers have their way.

So, in this time of thanksgiving, when the frost is on the pumpkin, I give thanks to Jack and MaryAnn for their intelligence and their love and all the virtues they gave to their children with great passion and dignity.

Thanks for reading.