A TV Station Interviewed Me About My Pumpkin Farm for 40 Seconds. By Morning, 9 Million People Had Watched It, and 600 Women Were Lined Up at My Gate

I thought she was joking.

She wasn’t.

Her name was Denise. She was a retired school bus driver from Joliet, and she organized the whole thing in about twenty minutes. Her daughter was a nurse who knew how to run a disaster triage. Somebody from the Indiana church group had a megaphone.

By eight o’clock, there were two hundred women in my pumpkin field in borrowed gloves, cutting stems, rolling pumpkins into rows and loading the wagons.

By nine, there were four hundred.

My crew stood there with their mouths open.

“Don’t just stand there,” Denise yelled at them. “Show them how it’s done!”

My insurance agent called at ten.

“Kip. What’s this I’m seeing on TV? You’ve got four hundred people working in your field? Do you know what your liability exposure is right now?”

“I didn’t invite them, Gary.”

“Did they sign anything?”

“They’re cutting pumpkins.”

“If one of them cuts a finger, Kip, I’m going to have a heart attack.”

My sister, who is a paralegal, printed a one-page volunteer waiver from her laptop. The church group from Indiana made two hundred copies at the library in Morton. Every woman signed one before she got a pair of gloves.

Gary drove out at noon to see it for himself. He stood at the fence looking at the field for a long time.

Then he went and got a pair of gloves.

By the end of Wednesday, we’d picked twenty-two thousand pumpkins.

By the end of Thursday, all forty thousand.

The trucks left on Friday morning, four days early.

I’d talked more that week than in the previous ten years. I’d been hugged by more strangers than I knew existed. I’d signed pumpkins, hats, phones and one woman’s arm, which I told her was a bad idea, and she said she was getting it tattooed anyway.

On Friday night, after everybody left, my mother found me sitting on the hay bales behind the barn in the dark.

“Kip,” she said. “There’s one more.”

“One more what?”

“Woman,” she said. “At the gate. She says she’s not here because of the video.”