Pony rides, gigantic black grasshoppers, and gourds that looked more like fish fins than squash — it was all part of our pumpkin patch adventures near Prescott this weekend.
There were the largest black grasshoppers I’ve ever seen, and a deer with long black eyelashes, and dried sunflower faces as big as a dinner plate. Isabel rode a pony named Pepsi and her friend Elena rode on Trigger, and the smiles on the girls were so gleeful that my heart welled up with joy. I had never seen some of the strange gourds with fins and curves, looking more organic and odd than any pumpkin in our local bigbox grocery, resembling fish or protozoa instead of a squash. So when Isabel requested that we get some I eagerly agreed and helped her pick out some of the most otherworldly of them. We enjoyed petting the goats, or not exactly PETTING them (their fur is greasy and bristly, not soft), but rather looking at their large gentle eyes and their pretty faces, and exclaiming over how cute they are! Over and over! How we loved them! They tolerated our presence in their pen, as we side-stepped around piles of pellets and splashes of urine, and blinked their own gorgeous eyelashes as they looked off into the fields of wilted sunflower vines and hard earth, thinking who knows what in their hard goaty heads.