The Tao of Martha (31 page)

Once the elements of liquor and straight men were added to the mix, Halloween exponentially improved. Playing the “Monster Mash” at a junior high bash was always fun back in the day. But hearing the same song while swilling grape trash-can punch with my sorority sisters, all done up in matching cat costumes?

Incomparable.

Even the silliest bits of Halloween, like carving pumpkins, were fun when executed with my best college buds.

So I can honestly say I
loved
Halloween.

Until I didn’t.

Maybe it was because the party invitations stopped rolling in after graduation, when no one wanted to throw down in a Princess Leia outfit on a Tuesday night. Possibly I lost my passion for the day because I was so broke as a young professional that I couldn’t afford to fill anyone’s pillowcases with something fun-size.

Most likely what soured me was seeing grown-ass adults wearing costumes to their day jobs. I had a lot of cognitive dissonance when I’d receive my day’s assignments from someone dressed like Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz
. Does your little dog want me to complete a spreadsheet, too? I didn’t enjoy sitting around the conference room while Count Dracula and Mr. Clean droned on about go-to-market strategy; nor was I a fan of having to elect health care benefits with Tony the Tiger in HR. And the day I went to deposit my paycheck with the teller dressed in
a gorilla suit? Suffice it to say I did not go ape for the bank’s new mon(k)ey market accounts.

To date, I’ve successfully avoided Halloween for more than a decade. Back when Fletch and I were too destitute to go out for dinner during peak trick-or-treat hours, we’d cover the windows with garbage bags, which made our place look vacant and unintentionally spooky. We’d turn out all the lights and sit in the dark watching TV while wearing headphones. When we moved to the place with a big security fence, we padlocked the gate and headed out for Thai. And I have to be honest—when it came time to buy our first home, we picked the one at the end of a long, wooded drive on a sparsely populated street, partially in hopes that roving bands of Gypsies and Elmos would pass us by.

And for the past two years, they have…largely because with all the lights off, you can’t even tell there’s a house here. The first year we went to a movie, but last year we stayed home and watched television (no headphones!) upstairs. I didn’t have candy, but I figured if anyone braved the long, dark walk, then they’d be rewarded with a chocolate–peanut butter PowerBar.

Hey, those things are two bucks apiece—so,
you’re welcome
, Yoda.

But this year, everything changes.

Martha goes all out for Halloween; ergo, so will I.

Or I’ll go all John Wilkes Booth on myself while trying.

Which is an option I’ve not yet ruled out.

T
o get into the Halloween spirit, I first need to make this place look festive. I have to set the stage for trick-or-treaters so there’s no confusion that we’re open for business on the big day. Yet one of the (myriad) things I
despise about Halloween is tacky yard decor. I don’t want to fill my lawn with fake tombstones, and I’m not about to make the landscapers weed around them. Frankly, after dulling their mower blades with hidden plastic Easter eggs and fallen piñata candies all summer, they’re not my number one fans.

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.

“L
et’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 something 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.