Vegetable 911

I rescued a pumpkin today. It was sitting in someone's garbage at the side of the road. I passed it on my daily walk, noticing it as I simultaneously noticed the trash truck rumbling and sputtering at the end of the cul-de-sac.

I was a large pumpkin. And I was tired. And it seemed silly. But the truck heaved itself closer and I caught the stink of diesel fumes and it was like catching the smell of a predator through tall grass.

So I went into this other person's garbage, this person I didn't know. My logical left brain kept poking at me -- this is illegal, you know, it said, you're trespassing and that's a big damn heavy pumpkin and oh God, it's covered in spaghetti sauce or something worse, just walk away and forget this happened . . .

I ignored this voice. The stranger's neighbor tending his yard saw me pilfering the pumpkin. He waved. I couldn't wave back with an arm full of pumpkin but I smiled and nodded as I hoped any harmless eccentric might, so I wouldn't alarm him.

The pumpkin was intact. No spaghetti sauce -- my left brain had been pulling a fast one. Someone had drawn a ridiculous face on it with a magic marker, a cupid bow mouth and seductive slanty bat-bat eyes. Miss Thang, said the inscription.

"Come here, baby," I said to it. "You've suffered enough."

I took it home to where it rests on my front porch, communing with the other pumpkins still left over from Halloween.

I don't know why I did this. Perhaps it is my new pagan sensibility that makes me notice such a rift in nature's cycles, the bright orange organic against the plastic soda bottles. I have always recycled but it has been out of duty -- yes, I am a good liberal and I know what's good for the planet and I will do what I must. But now I am finding something else in tucking vegetable peelings in a bowl to take outside to the compost bin. Something sacred. I do not toss that word around. I mean it. There is something larger in what used to be merely responsible.

So what is the larger thing? I contradict myself in the asking, because the importance of this pumpkin turned not on the larger but on the smaller, on something finite. Something small enough to get my arms around and carry home.