Ned took the boys pumpkin-shopping at a nearby farm — a real, honest-to-goodness thriving working farm, about 1\/2 mile out of Boston!\u00a0 Needless to say, the choice of pumpkins and gourds there is far more stunning than the big bin-o-punkins right outside the sliding doors of Stop & Shop.<\/p>\n
I didn’t go because I was on my second day of a new experiment of mine:\u00a0 cold weather bike rides.\u00a0 I refuse to give up riding; I just can’t stand to.\u00a0 If it’s sunny, why not just layer up and go?\u00a0 It’s different, alright.\u00a0 It’s so much less immediate, because there’s so little skin exposed.\u00a0 You pedal through a cloud of cotton and spandex.\u00a0 You’re so much more in your own world because of the ear-warmers under the helmet.\u00a0 It’s a little like being under water.<\/p>\n
As I ride I see the same things over and over, but they look a little bit different every time.\u00a0 I take the same few routes, or vary them just a tiny bit.\u00a0 I don’t get bored.\u00a0 The sameness is part of the joy.\u00a0 The sameness with just a tinge of new.\u00a0 I pass that same Parks and Rec meadow (well, it’s just a soccer field but if you approach it just a certain way, it is kind of a meadow.\u00a0 You have to play these kinds of games with yourself when you ride in fairly urban areas.).\u00a0 Everytime I pass that field, it looks a little different.\u00a0 Two days ago the weed trees were the color of fire.\u00a0 These are straggly palm-leafish kinds of beasts that spring up everywhere if you’re not careful — one even sprung out of the side of my foundation — but the thing is, in the autumn, even these are gorgeous.\u00a0 A sunset of colors.<\/p>\n
But it was a tough choice, because I love the annual pumpkin run.\u00a0 You pull a splintery flat wagon through the rows and you get surprise after surprise of the weirdness of pumpkins.\u00a0 Well, I made my cherce, as they say in Joisey, and so I missed it this year.\u00a0 But my loved ones brought me back such bounty:\u00a0 four very big, carve-able Jack-O-Lantern types; 3 pale-colored greens or pinks for decoration; and two sugar ones for baking pies. Ned was telling me about how one pumpkin they came upon was three feet long and U-shaped!\u00a0 He also described a genie-bottle-shaped gourd that had fins somehow sticking out of it.\u00a0 “Like an alien,” he said.<\/p>\n
Randomness in nature is, to me, proof of God.\u00a0 Because it is through the randomness that we get such intense new beauty, that lights us up inside.\u00a0 The weed tree is now the Queen of the Meadow.\u00a0 The absurd, monstrous reject veggies become the jewel in the crown of our porch steps.\u00a0 The autistic, non-verbal, arm-waving sometimes scary young man is also sometimes the most breath-taking, heart-stopping, mind-boggling individual ever to cross my path, and so my path is very wide because of him.\u00a0 We all have our beauty and our purpose, but you have to figure out your own season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ned took the boys pumpkin-shopping at a nearby farm — a real, honest-to-goodness thriving working farm, about 1\/2 mile out of Boston!\u00a0 Needless to say, the choice of pumpkins and gourds there is far more stunning than the big bin-o-punkins right outside the sliding doors of Stop & Shop. I didn’t go because I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-sC","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1774"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1778,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1774\/revisions\/1778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}