For November 17th, Simon's half-birthday

Another pumpkin-growing season ended in September. To be exact, I harvested pumpkins for the 9th time in my backyard garden, all of them descendants of the first pumpkin--Simon's Pumpkin. In the spring of first grade, 2004, Simon came home with a styrofoam cup of dark dirt and two small plants from sprouted seeds, a pumpkin and a sunflower. Both were moving past the initial two oblong leaves that emerged from a seed into the more differentiated growth of each plant's shapely mature leaves. I set the plants near one another in the backyard, and they grew all summer.

The sunflower opened a first bloom on August 7th, the morning after Simon died. The petals were a somber brown tinged in fiery red. The pumpkin sent one strong shoot straight toward the house, toward the room where Simon lay. At the time of his death, there was one sole pumpkin, dappled dark green. It was a hospice nurse who suggested saving the seeds. "Grow them every year," she said. "That's Simon's pumpkin."

In 2010, the one year during which I grew no crop of pumpkins because we left our Utah house, we moved to Germany. And here the project continues. On Sunday, November 17th, I halved two pumpkins, pulled out their seeds, and baked the halves face down in the oven until they were soft. With the drained cooked flesh I made a pie (and froze the rest). Miriam carved a dedication to Simon into the baked pie. Three heart shapes fill the space around: 16.5 Simon. He would have been sixteen and a half this week.

For a writing project this month of November (more on that soon), I am drafting a memoir about my early years as a mother, the years with a sick child, the years after his death. I want to present an excerpt here of the text I wrote on Sunday, after making and sharing the pie with Miriam and Markus.

A Simon's Pumpkin Pie, November 17, 2013

From a manuscript in progress, working title: A Partial Mother (please keep in mind it's a draft)

The juice of a pumpkin dries like a strange new skin on the palms of my hands. I can’t wash it away. I’ve just sunk both hands into the innards of two pumpkins, separating plump whole seeds from the stringy insides. I will clean, dry and save the seeds. As I work, I suppress the impulse to find every last seed, the pile inside my red plastic bowl already nearing the rim. I am saving the seeds to grow pumpkins again next summer, just as I have done every year since 2004. Well, except the year we moved to Germany (2010) when I didn’t grow pumpkins at all.

I scaled the project back this year, looking for the right perspective. I keep envelopes of seeds in the basement, marked by the year the pumpkin grew. Last year I set in seeds from almost all the prior years, starting with the 2004 Ur-pumpkin. Year after year, I grow seeds harvested from that first pumpkin. Year after year, I seem to come no closer to running out of those seeds. My garden choked last year under all those plants: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2011. (I skip 2007 because those pumpkins were long, pale and strangely like zucchini, and because that year is one I prefer to forget.) I watch the plants grow with a misplaced pride: the 2004 pumpkin—Simon’s own pumpkin—sprouts first on the window ledge indoors, where I stick seeds into pockets of dirt in an egg carton I’ve labeled with the corresponding date. The 2004’s sprawl most confidently over the garden, burst open the first flowers, and nearly always create the earliest and best-looking fruit. As if it were a competition, as if there is some winning to be found in that plant—that vintage—being the best one. When I harvest a pumpkin, I trace its ridged and twisting vine back to its origin in the ground to find a little sign with the year of the seed. “2004” I notate in black Sharpie on the underside of the pumpkin, near the blossom stub—the flat navel of the fruit. In September I rescue the fruit from under mildewed and crumbling leaves, from shredded, rancid vines. I rinse the pumpkins off and set them to ripen in the sun, for Halloween or pumpkin pie.

Today will be pumpkin pie day, and it is fitting. November 17^th is Simon’s half-birthday. He would be sixteen and a half years old today. Or he is sixteen and a half years old today. I lack the certainty to say that he lives, that he is aging alongside the rest of us, that his development continues in a measurable way. Because I do not know where Simon is now. We do not speak. He does not come to me in dreams. My imagination falls weakly aside when I try to picture him with a deep voice, with a neck drawn taut by testosterone, with armpit or pubic hair, with dreams for his own adult life. Miriam is tall now, like Markus. She dwarfs me on the rare occasions she’ll accept a hug, all the while telling me how small I am. Would Simon be tall, too? Or was he going to be smaller, like me? When he died—when he was seven—the top of his head reached the base of my sternum when I hugged him to me.

My power of imagination meets another challenge. Do I picture Simon as a nearly grown young man, unaffected by illness? Or do I see him with the late effects of cancer treatment: stunted growth, cognitive deficiencies, the psychological legacy of a sick kid? I asked Markus the other day, in some situation where Simon came to mind, if he envisioned him progressed through time with no sign of cancer, or if he factored all that in somehow? It seems easier, we agreed, to imagine the entirety of Simon’s cancer away. Why not, if all we have is what we can imagine anyway?

I do not fault myself for projecting a mother’s pride onto the pumpkin Simon brought home in first grade. As I slide the seeds from their fibrous trappings, I marvel at nature’s prolific production. There are hundreds, maybe a few thousand, seeds inside one pumpkin. All of that (and the leaves and vines and any other fruit of that plant) grew from the power contained in one flat cream-colored pointy-ended seed. The pumpkin, like other plants, does not rely on bearing just one or two offspring (as we humans do), but creates these hundreds of seeds, all of which hold the potential to replace that one pumpkin in another year’s growing cycle. Think of a tree laden with apples. Think of the dandelion’s silvery head. I always also have to think of cancer: just one lousy mutation can perpetuate itself into a killing force. I used to fantasize that I could remove Simon’s cancer cells, by hand, carefully and doggedly, the way I sort through the slime and the seeds in a pumpkin. I would have persisted for hours, for days, forever until I cleaned out every last killing cell.

My fingers search. My eyes see another pocket of off-white seeds tucked like a stack of coins against the pumpkin’s flesh. I could get every last seed. I have to force myself not to try.