Your Friendly Neighborhood Pumpkin Patch...

 For years and years every fall our family would load up the van and head west...not too far west (we'd drive into water...) but west enough that homes and streets gave way to open fields and in one of those large tracks of land, they grew pumpkins. It was a great place to satisfy all our pumpkin-related needs during the Halloween season.

That was then--this is now. 

When you relocate, you have to find new grocery stores, new eye doctors, new almost everything--even new places to buy pumpkins. Sure, you can pick them up at the local stores, but we hoped we'd find something similar to what we were used to. They don't have that type of establishment where we now live. The other day, we even drove by a local farm that sold pumpkins and we decided to stop in and do some shopping, but on the day we decided to go, it was closed.

What to do?

We turned the van around and headed down a country lane. I thought I had seen a sign for a corn maze while driving around earlier this month. Maybe they'd have some pumpkins. Before we arrived, however, we drove by a humble little farm and we noticed many pumpkins for sale.

Jackpot!

We stopped and loaded up the van. The only resident that came out to greet us was an adorable and very smart boarder collie who had a tail that never stopped wagging. We chose our trophies, then wrote a check for the amount of the goods and put it in a coffee can on the home's front porch.

It was different. It wasn't the farm with a hay maze, or zip lines, or corn hole games, or pumpkin tetherball. It was simple, humble, hometown, neighborly. It was, in a word, wonderful.