I took my son to a pumpkin field north of the city on Thanksgiving Monday, after roast turkey and red wine consumed the night before gave back their somnolent power. We drove through town, the unfamiliar north side where dim sum and pawnshops and rows of walk up apartments barely blinked at our smooth Volvo passage.
He wore a leather jacket and a slouch cap and took up so much room in the front the modern seat motor whirred to make room for his knees clashing with the dash. My son, his loping feet size twelve, his shoulders broadening and growling under a stripped new September tee, already too small, his chin a jumble of hormones and whiskers and the wild eruptions of fourteen-year-old man-boy, almost of age.
My boy and I were together for the day despite the fact that I’d encouraged another – his girl, perhaps? – a teenager named Jane whom he’d gravely told me the other day: “you know were dating now,” and when I inquired about the change between “just friends” and “dating” he’d drummed his fingers on the counter asking why there was rarely anything good to eat.
My boy and I on a road, on a sun soaked highway heading past haystacks so golden I swear they have been placed upon the field for the express purpose of calendar shots, that shimmering feast of harvest a riot of warmth for my hungry-for-the-country eyes. We travel fast and talk little and yet what hangs between us is as rich as the farmers yield, as certain as the beets and spuds and strangely misshapen carrots I pulled from our backyard garden the day before. Our silence is a feast of mother/son love, revealed in the autumn glow as the last of this certain light gives way to frost.
We turned into a farm, some pumpkin patch, corn maze place I had found on-line the day before to solidify our adventure and I immediately realize my mistake as he unfolds his slouch frame, surely six full feet by now, from the passengers seat squeeze.
“Mom, this is for little kids.”
And, indeed it is. Small yelping tykes, from age two to eight, launch themselves off haystacks, beg tokens to shoot pumpkins from a blasting cannon for the pleasure of watching them mush against a distance pirate ship, its flags in stringy tatters half an acre away. The parents, thirty-something’s, fresh in the throes of what to do without nursery school, hover nearby, exhilarated by family time, their cameras clutched close to capture the fleeting cuteness of this October adventure.
Oh, my boy is embarrassed.
“We can still do the corn maze,” I cajole. “You like corn mazes. Let’s take a look, we’ve come this far,” and, bless him, he agrees, and we line up with shrieking children mad for the petting zoo, the haunted house, the painted pumpkins and I see the time between then and now is realized in the shifting stance of these patrons, impatient to begin.
Meanwhile my boy, this young man, smiles at me shyly and suggests the entry fee may not be worth the price of admission, but I will not agree and we both know I am buying autumn’s times before he slips away into the silence of his own long winter.
“You like it, Mom,” he teases, and I must admit I do. I chomp on a caramel candied apple while he is satisfied with the least autumnal item, a tin of coke, as we walk together, stroking alpacas and goats, a rabbit hutch of squirming young. When I ask his to hold a tiny bunny he only shrugs, so I lean down into the straw and find another boy, the shadow of my companion, pale and shy and not yet three and I hold the baby rabbit out, “gentle, gentle,” I command as this other long ago boy reaches his grubby hand to touch.
Through the empty pumpkin fields my son and I walk. I make a scarecrow from straw and old clothes and while he allows this mother indulgence, he staves it off by plucking a wizened gourd from the vine and flipping it up and away, his boy smile broader than any jack-o-lantern we have ever carved.
We entre the corn maze together and it’s then I see my son alive as he charges zigzag and headlong through the drying stocks of corn, his comment tossed off like the now forgotten gourd. “Soon I’ll see above the trail” he crows amid the labyrinth maze of this particular harvest.
Oh, I am subdued when at last we leave, but there is something accomplished in our departure and that 32 kilometer drive back to town. He puts his head back, closes his eyes and in the warm afternoon glow I see him into his next incarnation, grateful for the wrong-headed, right -hearted afternoon we have spent together as the husk of his childhood falls away and the bare autumn fields surrender their fruits.
As my son sleeps – for sleep they must – I silently thank the God of Harvest for this lad who, even as he shakes off childish ways, allow me to remain a seed keeper, a sure and certain memory receptacle for all his boyish ways.
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