They smell like sunshine

When my youngest, Grayson, was three I had two teenagers as well, and there was no time left in the day for anything that was not strictly necessary. So when a few free hours turned up one weekend, I asked him what he would like to do.

I was hoping he would say "sleep". Or possibly "a spa treatment".

"Mommy, let's go to the farm."

Anyone who knows me can stop laughing now. I am not a farm girl. But off we went, on one of those cool, bright fall days Ontario does so well, and for two straight hours nothing else in the world existed. We did all of it. Pony rides. Hay bales. The mazes. We fed the goats and the chickens and ate butter tarts that were still warm.

When I told him it was time to go, he said, "Okay. Thanks, Mommy, I had fun," and we walked hand in hand toward the gate.

Then he stopped dead.

"Mommy, we have to stop!"

I asked him what was wrong.

"We forgot to smell the pumpkins!"

So back we went to the pumpkin patch. Gray bent right down and breathed in as deeply as a three year old can.

"So what do they smell like, Gray?"

He looked up at me, delighted.

"They smell like sunshine!"

What I took home

I had gone to the farm to be a good mother for two hours and get back to my list. He had gone to the farm to be at the farm. Only one of us was doing it properly.

Abundance comes in all shapes and sizes, and in my experience it turns up when you least expect it. That afternoon it was a pumpkin.

That three year old is a grown man now. If you have grown children of your own, you will have a pumpkin somewhere too: one small thing they said that you have carried around for twenty years.

October is a good month to go and smell one on purpose. They are stacked outside every grocery store in the province. Nobody will mind, and if they do, tell them a three year old said it was important.

From the archive. First written for my journal years ago, and rewritten for life after 50.