The Tao of Martha: My Year of LIVING

by Jen Lancaster

  Anyway, I have a strong aversion to decor that is gross, so I eschew decorating with fake blood. Ditto for guts or eyeballs. Don’t even start me on how much I abhor the super-realistic scary stuff; there’s a house in town with a mannequin hanging from a noose, and every time I pass it on my way to the post office, I lose a year of my life. And anything with a skeleton on it makes me feel fat.

  But I don’t hate pumpkins.

  That’s where I’ll start.

  When I was a kid in New Jersey, my family once trooped out to the boonies to visit a pumpkin farm. I loved everything about this day—the pastoral setting, the corn maze, the pick-your-own pumpkin-patch part, the bags of misshapen gourds—but what really won me over were the cinnamon doughnuts and hot apple cider served in the snack booth. This last bit made an indelible impression. Fletch and I have been together for eighteen years now, and like clockwork, the minute October hits, I stock up on cider and doughnuts. But somehow, it’s never quite the same. I keep saying that one day I’ll find a pumpkin farm with proper cider and doughnuts, but I’ve never quite gotten there.

  For decorating inspiration, I find a video clip where Martha features the Shelton family pumpkin farm in Connecticut. That’s when I decide that instead of hitting Home Depot, I’m going to pick my own pumpkins this year! Yes! This can happen! A quick Google later I find an authentic pumpkin patch less than ten miles away. Woo-hoo!

  (While I have Google open, I also do an image search on “prostitutes.”)

  (Yeah…about the tights and poet blouse? Big mistake. Big. Huge.)

  The patch is really close to where we bought our trees this summer, so I won’t even need to use GPS to get there. This is so exciting! I’m all anticipatory over grabbing a little red wagon and then selecting pumpkins at my leisure. I want a couple of really big ones for the door, and then a bunch for carving.

  I’ve been consulting Halloween: The Best of Martha Stewart Living for design ideas, and I’ve already downloaded a couple of carving templates from her Web site. I love the wood-grain faux-bois pattern, and I’m torn between whether I want my theme to be witches or black cats. Maybe I’ll just go elegant and do the one with the ginkgo leaves.

  The closer I get to the patch, the more wound up I am. I haven’t had proper outdoor hot cider and fresh doughnuts in thirty-five years, and I just know the experience will have been worth the wait. My only regret is that Fletch isn’t with me, but he’s busy finishing a painting project.

  As I approach the entrance, I find myself stuck in a line of traffic. Huh. I wonder what happened here? Maybe there’s an accident up ahead? I hope this delay doesn’t have to do with difficulties with the deep fryer.

  Five minutes later, I discover the source of the stoppage—it’s not an accident. Rather, the holdup stems from the dozens of SUVs waiting to enter Pumpkinfest.

  Shit.

  What I see before me isn’t a twee, rustic farm in the middle of the New Jersey wilds…Instead, it’s a gourd-themed festival, with petting zoos and performance stages and honest-to-God carnies manning the ring-toss booths. There are no hayrides, because why would you want to tool along on the back of a horse-drawn wagon when you can zoom around on a mini roller coaster? Or defy gravity in a moon bounce? Or have your photo taken with a baby kangaroo?

  I pull in and begin to maneuver across the massive expanse of the field currently being used as a parking lot. The nearest spot I can find is literally three-tenths of a mile away from the entrance. I quickly calculate exactly how far I’m willing to carry a pumpkin from point A to my car, and realize that if I don’t get within spitting distance, Pumpkinfest is not going to happen, particularly since my foot isn’t completely healed from this summer’s plantar fasciitis. I mean, I walk slowly, but I never walk backward.

  Twenty-five minutes of fruitless searching for a closer spot later, I’m so frustrated that I want to weep, yet I can hear Martha’s voice in my head saying, “There’s no crying in Halloween.”

  (Unless no cute nerds want to do the Monster Mash with you in a graveyard.)

  I ask myself what Martha would do in this situation, and then I remember that she has an endorsement deal with Home Depot. So I’d be perfectly justified in leaving the patch to buy my pumpkins there.

  That’s when I realize I’ve inadvertently uncovered another piece of Martha’s Tao: Practice the homemaker’s version of Occam’s razor, which is the law of parsimony. The most succinct path is almost always the correct path.

  Consider this—Martha’s a huge proponent of simplicity. Her undertakings are successful because she never overcomplicates them. She concentrates on doing the right activity at the right time. That doesn’t mean her projects can’t be complex and multistepped; rather, it’s that she doesn’t fight the natural flow of the universe. She’s not one to plow blithely on when environmental factors are against her. For example, if she wants to do a show segment on canning, she’s not about to undertake this in March, when the only tomatoes available are from South America or her own personal greenhouse. She’ll wait until they’re ripe everywhere for everyone. So although the canning process may be complex, she’ll undertake it only once nature properly sets the scene. That makes so much sense.

  I take a big step back and assess my current situation. My goal for the day is to have some pumpkins to carve tonight. They don’t need to be local, organic, or self-picked; they just need to be orange and round. The point of today was to buy pumpkins, and not necessarily to pick them. And the most succinct way to buy them is to visit Home Depot. I can park out front, wheel all my purchases to my car in a sturdy cart, and I’ll be in and out in ten minutes. Thus I’ll have preserved my energy, which I can then channel into carving.

  My sense of relief in not having to deal with the crowd and the walk is palpable as I steer out of the parking lot. Still, as I make my way to the Depot’s impressive and affordable selection, I pledge to find a more remote pumpkin patch, because I’ll be damned if I miss out on doughnuts one more year.

  “Let’s do this!” I exclaim.

  Fletch and I are sitting at the newspaper-covered kitchen table, each of us with a stack of stencils and a variety of carving tools at our sides. We figure we’ll practice on a couple of smaller pumpkins so that we’ll be ready to tackle the big guys. I explain my vision of a sea of glowing pumpkins cascading across the front porch and down the step, flowing all the way to the end of the bluestone walkway. The pumpkins are beautifully carved, and their warm golden glow lights up the whole front of the house. In my head, the scene is downright majestic, and I feel like Martha would be proud!

  “I can’t tell you the last time I carved a pumpkin,” Fletch says.

  “Me neither. But how fun is this going to be?”

  He exhales rather loudly through his nose. “That remains to be seen.”

  I look over to where he’s currently frowning at the big orange orb in front of him. “Hey, you don’t trust me here, do you?”

  He eyes me warily. “Do you blame me?”

  As I’ve approached various projects on this endeavor, he claims I keep Tom Sawyering him. He’ll see me doing something badly (his opinion, not mine), and when he tries to offer suggestions, I’m defensive. More than once I’ve retorted, “Oh, yeah? Well, I’d like to see you do it better!”

  Which he then does.

  Actually, Fletch couldn’t join me on my expedition today because he was busy finishing one of my botched (again, his word, not mine) home-improvement projects. He said he couldn’t stand watching me slop paint all over the gun cabinet I’d decided to convert to a china hutch, so he sanded everything back down to bare wood and started from scratch. Then he proceeded to work his paintbrush like he was Michelangelo and my ex–gun cabinet the Sistine Chapel, and the project went from the course of one afternoon to two full weeks.

  He was less than pleased.

  I give him a big hug. “Luff you! And I love my fab new china cabinet!”

  He grunts in response, then mutters som
ething about how those were two weeks of his life he’ll never get back.

  I return my attention to the task at hand. I plunge my knife into the top of a pumpkin. I kind of have to shove it in, because the blade I’m using is a bit spindly, even though it’s specifically made for this task. In my distant memories, I recall my knife slipping through the pumpkin’s flesh as though it were warm butter, but that’s definitely not the case here. I stab again—repeatedly—and I finally gain purchase.

  I saw back and forth and feel like I’m trying to hack through a log with a nail file. Why is this so hard? Are these unripe or something?

  “Do you remember it being so hard to slice up the pumpkin?” I ask.

  He shakes his head vehemently. “No. No, no. You are not doing this to me. I am not going to be your pumpkin bitch. As it is, I can barely move my shoulder from all the damn painting. I’m not carving your pumpkins for you.”

  I’m taken aback. “Didn’t ask you to; I’m just commenting on this being a little tougher than I remember.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I keep plugging along on the top of my pumpkin. “But the skin is thicker than I recall. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Mmm.”

  The force I’m exerting on the blade causes it to bow and the whole damn thing almost snaps, at which point it would have slashed the tender skin between my thumb and forefinger. “Shit! I almost stabbed myself!”

  Fletch’s lips tighten as he works. His deft but delicate swipes cut a smooth swath through his own pumpkin and he’s quickly able to remove the top. He is the Pumpkin Whisperer.

  “Hey, Fletch, that was so easy for you! Will you demonstrate how you did it?”

  With a fake Southern accent, Fletch drawls, “‘Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.’”

  “I was just—”

  “Going to offer to trade me your apple core for the opportunity to carve your pumpkin? No.”

  I grumble something about liking to see him do it better, but he doesn’t rise to my bait.

  Oh, crap. He’s right. I actually do Tom Sawyer him. My bad.

  Eventually I’m able to remove my own lid, and I begin the process of scooping out the pumpkin guts. In retrospect, I should have allowed the pumpkins to come up to room temperature first, because not only is this process slimy and disgusting—it’s also freezing. Every time I grab a handful of innards, half of the stringy goo gushes out and squirts all over the newspapers, and the other half ends up on my shirt. When I use a spoon to scrape down the sides, my wrist quickly grows sore, and picking up stray seeds is tantamount to trying to catch a greased pig.

  I scrape and squirt, slosh and spill. This is gross.

  There’s not one satisfying aspect to this whole process.

  And now I stink of gourd bowels.

  “This is nauseating,” I comment.

  “It sure is,” he replies placidly. That’s when I notice that he had the presence of mind to put on rubber gloves before disemboweling his pumpkin.

  “I’m not enjoying this.” I sulk. This is not his fault, of course. (But I don’t tell him that.)

  “Listen.” He waxes philosophical while smoothing out the sides of his perfectly rounded pumpkin-lid hole. “There’s a reason we stopped carving pumpkins years ago. Bet this is a lot like dyeing Easter eggs. In your head you spend all year fantasizing about how fun pumpkin carving is going to be, but in reality, it’s just foul-smelling and labor-intensive, and ultimately all your hard work will be eaten by rodents.”

  I reply, “You may be onto something.”

  He wipes a stray bit of pumpkin gut from his cheek with the back of his hand. “Martha’s created an industry out of home-based initiatives, but her success came because people enjoy doing the activities she’s taught them. It doesn’t matter if you can perfectly sculpt your pumpkin if you actively despise every minute of it. So I say, if you don’t enjoy the process, then stop. That idea applies to anything in life, not just gourds.”

  I glower at my stupid, cold, slimy pumpkin while he talks. I’m so aggravated with this project that I’m not going to order my usual pumpkin latte next time I’m at Starbucks. No, wait, I will order a VENTI latte, because that means more pumpkin had to die in order for me to drink it. Ha! Yes. That’s exactly what I’ll do.

  My workspace is glopped with pumpkin innards, and small shards have embedded themselves in the rug underneath. The newspaper covering is moist and sticky and starting to fuse with the tabletop. Pumpkin ooze is winnowing its way into the wood grain. I glance at my hands and they’re stained orange and with layers of pumpkin flesh layered under my nails.

  This?

  Right here?

  Is why I hate Halloween.

  While he speaks, Fletch removes his gloves and wipes his hands on a paper towel. “Jen, I’m sure there are plenty of other festive ways to decorate with pumpkins that don’t require us to perform surgery on them. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and by cat I mean pumpkin. Can’t you just dip them in glitter and call it a day?”

  I need a minute to process the genius of what he said.

  Without even realizing it, Fletch has just elucidated another facet in the Tao of Martha, which dovetails so neatly into what I discovered about opting for simplicity earlier today: There’s more than one path on the road to beautiful.

  Glitter pumpkins it is.

  I completely reimagine my Halloween display using whole pumpkins as the focal point, instead of jack-o’-lanterns. Apparently Martha regularly glitters the shit out of pumpkins and gourds. This is a brilliant alternative to the hassle and filth of carving, and I’m delighted by this turn of events. And Fletch was so pleased at not being stuck dissecting great gourds last night that he agrees to get his doughnut on with me at a pumpkin patch about an hour away.

  Today’s the most perfect specimen of fall day imaginable. The skies are impossibly blue and cloudless. The sun’s strong enough that we’re able to shed our jackets, but it’s not so hot that we complain of an Indian summer. We’re both in excellent moods and we laugh all the way to South Barrington…where we discover that the entire population of greater Chicagoland has had the exact same idea today.

  WTF?

  If the Pumpkinfest by our house was like a carnival, then what’s happening here is more on the scale of Disney World. Apparently this veritable Pumpkinpalooza is in the middle of nowhere because it’s so damn monolithic. Traffic to get onto the road leading to the festival is backed up for half an hour, and the parking lot is larger than that of Kings Island. If I thought having to lug a pumpkin three-tenths of a mile was bad, that pales in comparison to the literal mile we’d have to hoof to the entrance.

  Suddenly, contending with a few dozen SUVs doesn’t seem so bad.

  Fletch is exactly as fond of crowds as I am. We both grimace at the flannel-wearing, stroller-pushing, pumpkin-carrying mass of humanity standing between us and the hot cider.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Fletch says.

  Even though I’ve completed physical therapy on my foot, it’s still painful and I’m very cautious about walking long distances. “I’m not sure I can make it all the way to the entrance. Would you want to drop me off and meet me after you park?”

  “I am not your pumpkin valet.”

  “Damn.”

  He surveys the line of traffic again. “So…how important are these doughnuts to you?” he asks.

  Not enough to force the natural flow of things.

  I tell him, “Not enough to risk walking with a limp for the next month.”

  “Would you have a fit if we skipped it?”

  “Honestly?” I study the ocean of cars and tentatively flex my foot. Ouch. “No.”

  It takes us another twenty minutes until we’re able to turn the car around and head back up north. Our ride home is less festive, since we know that there’s no prospect of cider or doughnuts waiting for us at the end.

  However…all is not lost!

  As it turns out,
the universe really is Team Doughnut. Or possibly Team Simplicity.

  Fletch takes a different route home, and on our way we pass the first Pumpkinfest. Suddenly, the crowd and the parking situation seem very manageable, and I’m able to get to the entry without once hobbling.

  Fletch insists we ingest some protein before we complete our mission, so we feast on brats and burgers and roasted corn. Neither one of us can resist the siren song of a lemon shake-up, so we wash our meal down with a couple of small bucketsful.

  After wandering around the event—and briefly debating if I want to have my photo taken with a baby kangaroo—we order two hot ciders and half a dozen doughnuts directly out of the fryer. We’re content to work on our drinks before the doughnuts are cool enough to touch.

  As we perch on a bench across from the Tilt-A-Whirl, Fletch takes the first taste.

  “What do you think?” I ask.

  He cocks his head to inspect his doughnut before taking another cautious bite. He chews thoughtfully, and answers me only once he swallows, and that’s when a huge grin spreads across his face. “I…finally understand why you’ve been obsessing about these for thirty-five years.”

  I take my own bite, and the sugary spice is all that I remember and more. The warm cake is delicate and ever so slightly redolent of apples. The crunch of the coating is the perfect contrast to the soft, doughy middle, and the whole experience is enhanced times a million with a sip of the cider.

  We stay on that damn bench until we inhale every single one of those doughnuts and the last dregs of our cider. That’s when Fletch turns to me and says, “Do you want to throw up now?”

  “Little bit,” I concur.

  Of course, the plan was to purchase more pumpkins for glittering and a few gourds, but we quickly come to realize that the event isn’t crowded because everyone is inside in line waiting to pay for their purchases.

  Martha’s Tao dictates it’s time to leave.

  Also, Fletch says our indulgence has triggered his heretofore nonexistent diabetes, so we head home. Fletch collapses on the couch in sugar shock, but I still have supplies to buy for my outdoor display. I kiss him good-bye and make my way back to Home Depot.