One of my favorite ways to watch the seasons turn is to put the family’s jack o’lanterns at the edge of the woods right off the side of the house. Every few days as we walk to the bus stop or over to the grocer’s, we take a glance and see how the pumpkin faces have deflated. In a month, they’ll be covered in snow. In four months, all we’ll see are flattened orange disks of squash skin. Then the lillies will sprout through them and the last traces of them will disappear, replaced by orange blooms.
A rather more poetic end than that which our pumpkins meet. We line ‘em up on my rifle range in the woods and blast the bejeezus out of ‘em. Deeply satisfying.
Well, that fertilizes the soil too, doesn’t it? It’s just a different kind of poem.