The still fresh fall season is moving right long. The colors are stunning this year and truly seem to be taking their time to give us a grand show, not flashing fast and falling. This week, every highway or back road we can travel is a colorful delight. Mom Nature has us mesmerized at every turn. Let’s hope she doesn’t slap us with an early dose of the white stuff, which would make hunters happy and bring the rest of back to the reality that the year is fast disappearing. Halloween will soon arrive and deer season won’t be far behind. The rest of the year will slip away, lost in the excitement of Thanksgiving and Christmas. I have to be honest; I’ve given more than a little thought to both of these holidays. I’ve been sizing up every potential Christmas tree I’ve seen since August. But, first things first and only 10 days remain until Halloween. Time to buy more candy as we ‘tested’ the first one into oblivion, and to get some pumpkins spread about. The Gardener no longer grows pumpkins in his garden. He does, however, grow enough zucchini for all in the township. Pumpkins are for sale, like the dreaded zucchini, on every corner. When I was a kid on Blevins Street, more often than not, our jack-o-lanterns were grown in the backyard garden. Gardeners on our street grew for the larder and the table, they didn’t much go for championship size vegetables, and so our pumpkins were pretty average. There was no two hundred pound pumpkin perched on our front porch for Halloween. We had the basic orange, pleasingly plump, storybook variety of pumpkins with a semi-scary face behind a flickering candle. One season the pumpkins and squash in our garden intermingled. The results were huge, green and probably not edible (we didn’t). They looked like very long pumpkins with dark green and orange mottled skin like an unripe squash. The flesh was pale and hard like that of a winter squash, and somewhat ‘warty’ like a Hubbard. Of course, these odd hybrids produced with wild abandon. Dad gave them away to anyone who thought they had a use or were willing to try them. He made no guarantees for the table, but did suggest a use for Halloween. We selected a jumbo ‘green thing’ for our own Halloween use and stored it in the garage. When at last Halloween week arrived, I carried it into the kitchen and prepared to carve. With newspapers spread on the kitchen floor, the Stanley steak knives and the biggest of cooking spoons at hand I was prepared to gut the green ‘pumpkin’. Mom lent a hand with the lid and gave a pointer or two on pumpkin gut removal, mostly about keeping it all on the paper and in the bowl. She explained that there was only one way to do it. You just have to plunge in, bare-handed and up to the elbow. Squish a handful and pull those innards loose and repeat; soon enough those strings and seeds come out. Handful by spoonful, old jack will give up his guts. I liked the whole pumpkin process, from picking out the pumpkin, gutting it and cutting out the right face. I even liked the smell of singed pumpkin flesh when the candle flame burned high. In spite of the best discussed plans for creepy and scary faces, I just couldn’t do creepy and tended to the classic three triangles and a toothy grin family of jack-o-lanterns. These days my real pumpkins sit on the porch, a faceless decorative element, destined to become critter feed. My jack-o-lantern is in the window, its plastic face three triangles and a jagged toothy grin, lit by a small bulb, and no singed pumpkin aroma in the air. When Halloween is over I unplug it and put it away for another year. It has served the purpose for twenty years, quite unmemorably. Alas, for this electric pumpkin the adage is true. No guts no glory. * * *We were very sorry to hear of the passing of Joanne Chamberlain this week. She was among the dedicated ‘doers’ in our community. She was dedicated to her family and her church. She and Dean were long time-members of the choir. She was involved with the PTO and was a Girl Scout leader. She and Dean were members of the Marion Area Historical Society and Joanne held several board positions. She was very involved with the Marion Public Library (M. Alice Chapin Memorial Library), and took a weekly turn at the desk for many years. It takes a good deal of dedication to one’s community to give years of service to an organization or a club, or several at once. Dean was a member of the Marion Area Volunteer Fire Department for many years. Folks don’t seem to participate with their kind of dedication anymore. Always proud to be Marionites, Joanne and Dean invested their time in good and lasting things for our community. The loss of folks like the Chamberlain’s reaches far beyond their family. We all lost something.