Pumpkin

My roommate brought the pumpkin home a few weeks before Halloween. He placed it on the windowsill in the living room of our apartment. He decorated the outside window bars with a large black spider and fake cobwebs. It looked great.

The pumpkin moved around a bit, and for a short time it rolled out the open window, coming to rest outside between the window and the bars, in a space usually reserved for air conditioners. I remember it unhappy on its side, rocking between the bars in the breeze.

Halloween came and went, and all of a sudden it was past due to take down the decorations. We decided to keep the spider, took it down and moved it inside. It now hovers over our kitchen table.

“Should we get rid of the pumpkin?” Mark said. It had now been moved back inside.

I picked it up and held it in my hands. It was slightly soft, but seemed fine. The outside was completely clean. No discoloration of any kind.

“I think we can keep it for a little while longer. I like it.” I said as I centered the pumpkin perfectly on the windowsill.

Two weeks later on a lazy Sunday, I sat on the couch. Mark sat in the chair beside me and was mid-sentence when there was an odd, slight groan and crumble. I watched in horror as the pumpkin collapsed on itself and rolled off of the windowsill splattering disgustingly horrible onto the floor.

Neither one of us had touched it.

I could see now that it was way past moldy, a sticky black fur made up what used to be the inside and was now just a layer in the mush. Even though I had watched it fall, it had still startled me and I got up swiftly and ran to the other side of the room.

Mark was sitting with his back to the chaos and couldn’t see what had happened.

“What?” he said as he turned around craning his neck over his shoulder. “Oh, that’s disgusting,” he said when his eyes rested on the mush. I still stood frozen on the other side of the room.

We cleaned it up together. (After I snapped a picture.) Handful after handful of moldy pumpkin disappeared into the garbage, and as each sloppy, wet handful was replaced by another, I thought back to that fateful day of cleaning three weeks earlier.

“We really should have thrown this out when we had the chance,” I said.

“You’re the one who wanted to keep it,” said Mark. There was no arguing.

“You should have talked me out of it.”

Maybe it says a lot about a person whether or not they throw away an old pumpkin. (I tend to keep leftovers too.) I need to learn when to move on, and that all good things come to an end.

I learned a valuable lesson from that pumpkin: if you linger too long and try to hang on when things are past their prime, you might end up with rotting pumpkin all over your floor.