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 almost didn’t go.
I was so tired I couldn’t feel my feet. I’d been looked at and photographed and talked to for four days by a thousand people.
But my mother has a way of standing in a doorway that makes you get up.
The woman at the gate was about forty-five. Brown hair in a ponytail. A flannel jacket like mine. No phone in her hand. A big cardboard box at her feet.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Laurel. I’m the produce buyer for the grocery chain in St. Louis. Your forty thousand pumpkins are on my trucks.”
“I hope they’re all right.”
“They’re perfect,” she said. “That’s why I’m here. Fourteen years I’ve been buying from you. You’ve never once been late. You’ve never once sent me a bad pumpkin. I always wondered who you were.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I didn’t see your video until yesterday,” she said. “My assistant showed it to me. Nine million people. Six hundred women at your gate. I almost didn’t come, because I thought you’d be sick of people by now.”
“I am.”
“I figured,” she said, and pushed the cardboard box toward me with her boot. “So I brought you something that has nothing to do with the internet.”
I opened it.
Inside was a pie. A pumpkin pie. Homemade. Still a little warm.
“I made it from one of your Howdens,” she said. “This morning. Before my shift. It’s my grandmother’s recipe.”
I looked at the pie. Then at her.
“Patience,” she said, and smiled. “You give it good soil, a lot of sun, and you show up every day. Right?”
My face did that burning thing again.
“You did watch the video.”
“Forty seconds,” she said. “I’m a busy woman.”
My mother was standing on the porch behind me, pretending to water a plant in the dark.
“Laurel,” I said. “Would you like to come in and help me eat this?”
She looked at the house. At my mother, still watering the plant. At me.
“Only if you don’t post it,” she said.
I put my phone in the box with the pie.
Nobody’s seen it since.