Jamie spent several days on a business trip to Florida a few weeks ago. I encouraged him to go but it wasn’t until I realized I would be in charge of his pumpkin patch that I started having second thoughts.

If you’re just tuning in, my husband is obsessed with growing The Great Pumpkin. So obsessed, in fact, that we will soon be appearing on a major television network talking about it. All winter long, he had a makeshift grow room in our basement for his seedlings and transported them outside a couple of weeks ago because they were busting out of their pots.

No pun intended. I assure you the grow room is (mostly) honorable.

Because it is still cold at night, he built temporary wooden hoop houses to shield them from the elements. Every morning, he opens up the hoop houses and every evening, he closes them down while carefully monitoring the temperature of their heaters with his bedside thermometer.

That is another blog post unto itself.

He gave me very detailed instructions on caring for the plants, mostly pertaining to opening and closing the hoop houses. It seems like a simple task but any negligence on my part could be terminal: If I forgot to close the hoop houses at night and adjust the heater, the pumpkins would freeze to death. If I failed to turn off the heater and open them at just the right time the next morning, they would roast.

That’s a lot of pressure for an amnesic Pumpkin Wife.

Jamie grows his pumpkins on our neighbor’s lot and since I’m not keen on hopping two fences, I drove around the block my first morning on the job. I started to get out of the car with my 4-year-old son Bode when I noticed our neighbor’s dogs–a vicious-looking rottweiler and an ivory version of Cujo–ready to make us into mincemeat.

I was not told the pumpkin business was a matter of life and death.

I panicked and raced around to our neighbor’s house but no one was home. Even though I was late for a meeting, I knew I couldn’t leave the overheated pumpkins to melt in a scene reminiscent of the Nazis in the Raiders of the Lost Ark. With new resolve, I drove back around to the patch and I announced to Bode, “Let’s say a little prayer for the dogs to leave.”

I’d like to say it was one of those immortal prayers, much like when Jesus introduced the Lord’s Prayer, but it was more along the lines of, “Please make the bad dogs go away.”

But you know what? Those dogs slunked off not even 10 seconds after my desperate appeal. From Bode’s reaction, you’d have thought I parted the Red Sea and he would later compare the whole ordeal unto Daniel and the Lion’s Den.

I prefer to call it the Parable of the Pumpkin Patch.

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