By Peggy Sturdivant

I’ve been away. Doesn’t everyone need to get perspective on the life they are leading by stepping outside of it from time to time? Within nine hours of leaving for Sea-Tac on a Wednesday night I was standing in a pumpkin patch in Topsfield, Massachusetts. Not just any pumpkin patch: the growing grounds of a contender in the highly competitive Giant Pumpkin Contest at the 197th Annual Topsfield Fair.

Neighbors gathered to watch Woody’s pumpkin winched up and out the vines. Cracks or bruises could get the orange beast disqualified. My summer until then had been colored by Ballard turmoil and City Council debates. But on the first morning in New England, on a day that had started 24 hours earlier, the color was distinctly orange. The pumpkin looked like an elephant at rest rather than a giant gourd, if baby elephants were orange and ten times larger.

“Going for the pumpkin lift?” my sister’s neighbors had all asked one another as they emerged from their homes. All that was missing was a town crier.

A photographer was already training her long lens on the pumpkin’s creases. “Oh, Mrs. D’Amario is here too,” my sister said. That’s how you refer to your former high school teachers even when it’s been 37 years since graduation. The name caused my knees to buckle. Not only was Mrs. D’Amario’s classroom next to that of Mr. Rabin, the writing teacher who potentially saved my life, but she was covering the pumpkin lift for the local paper, The Tri-Town Transcript.

While several men wrapped chains around a wooden pallet to lift the orange beast onto a trailer I felt like I’d gone back in time. In high school we had our own page in The Tri-Town Transcript. On Sundays we’d gather at the advisor’s house and put the page to bed. I don’t even know what those words mean anymore. We had electric typewriters at best. How did we do the layout? I vaguely recall things like “inches” and “pasting.”

Yet The Tri-Town and The Martha’s Vineyard Gazette (which was bi-weekly in the summer) were the publications that influenced me most. They gave me the interest in writing about what’s directly around me. The small, everyday stories that make up how we live, and what we love.

Mrs. D’Amario is long retired from the high school English Department but still writes for the paper. We talked about how it is that I too am writing small town stories (pretending we’re not a city) All of my writing and beliefs go back to high school and a radical teacher who believed that everyone, even high school students, had a voice that should be heard. His classes brought together groups that would only otherwise pass in alphabetical homerooms: thespians and jocks, hoods and nerds. Mr. Rabin’s absolute passion was to create a safe place for personal voice within the seemingly treacherous halls of high school.

Mrs. D’Amario took over Mr. Rabin’s class my senior year when he died suddenly of a heart attack just before the holidays. He had two young boys. His older son had written him a letter that he dropped down onto the casket before they began to cover it with dirt and fresh fallen snow. His death and burial, within 24 hours per Jewish tradition, was the first death in so many of our callous ives.

Mr. Rabin’s death was just the first loss. Now I’ve lived long enough to have outlived my own students. But I probably wouldn’t even be a writer, or a teacher, if it hadn’t been for Mr. Rabin. ‘Everyone has a voice; everyone has a story.’ That took root in me so that what I love doing most is helping others to tell their story, either in this column, or in their work.

So a day before the parade and the Oldest Agricultural Fair in America opening its gates for the 197th year I gathered with my sister’s neighbors and other very local media in Woody’s backyard to watch a giant pumpkin. Because in the midst of politics and tragedy sometimes you just have to write about a gourd.

The chains held as the pumpkin rose in the air and then settled safely unblemished on the trailer, a day ahead of its trek to the fair where it would later place second, at
1,954 pounds. I hadn’t slept since leaving Ballard but already I could see my priorities as clearly as if suspended before in chains.

Now I’m back in Ballard and ready to return to the local harvest: our stories—big and small.

Dedicated to my “student” Mia Suverkrop Alexander, May 15, 1923-October 23, 2015