Cory, Tanya, my honey, and I took the scenic route home after dinner at Saline’s Salt City last weekend. The long rays of the setting sun bathed everything in a golden glow, especially the display of pumpkins for sale at the county fairgrounds.
Pumpkins and other showy squash and gourds were arranged in long rows according to price, which corresponded roughly to size. There were no whopper pumpkins. There’s a whole farm devoted to huge pumpkins nearby, for those in the market for them. There weren’t many plain orange pumpkins either. The fairgrounds display specialized in variety.
There were pumpkins of brightest yellow and light yellow. Ghost pumpkins in white. Grey, lumpy, irregularly shaped ones that looked like animate life forms, sleeping geese or baby seals. Red pumpkins—not red orange but actually red. Squash that looked like red-and-green calicoes. Fantastic gourds, my favorite one an apparent cross between a sea star and a pyramid, done in shiny greens.
What really made the pumpkin display fun was watching our neighbors dashing up and down the aisles of harvest bounty, delighted with what they were finding, eager to share what they discovered. Our esteemed neighbors are Ph.D.-trained scientists—a chemist and a microbiologist. Cavorting is a side of them we don’t often see.
Around the neighborhood and around town, people are decorating for Halloween in surprising ways. People on Lexington have positioned an enormous spider so that it seems to be climbing a tree, its various appendages wrapping themselves around the trunk and branches. A shiny, rainbow-colored skeleton is sitting in a lawn chair on Georgetown. Sue and I had to inspect it up close to appreciate it in all its wonder, and she believes it to be the work of someone with a 3D printer. The detail was amazing.
Waiting for the light at Washtenaw and Huron Parkway yesterday, I got passed by another skeleton. This one was a passenger on a motorcycle. Ms. or Mr. Bones was a good rider, with not a bit of wobble, and a safe one, too: she or he was wearing a helmet.
That wasn’t the oddest sight I saw on Huron Parkway, though. The oddest one was seeing a man using a very-long-handled squeegee to wash a pedestrian crossing light. This is not something I’ve seen before. Neither had anyone I’ve mentioned it to since then. We’d never given the matter of pedestrian-crossing-light cleanliness a moment’s thought.
How often does such a light need cleaning? Does the city have enough of them for this to be a full-time position? The website says we have one hundred sixty-two lighted intersections. If each one of those has sixteen pedestrian lights (WALK, DON’T WALK), that’s quite a few. And what about traffic lights and street lights? One Google source said street lights should be cleaned every two to four weeks, and at least one source said the lights need to be turned off before washing. We may have a whole crew out there working to keep us well lit. Just think what the job must have been like before the lights were electric.
Looking into the murky waters of a Traver pond this week, I saw an odd stick sort of thing just above the surface of the water. There was more symmetry to it than you generally expect of the end of a stick. It was a face, an unblinking, prehistoric-looking face, seemingly carved of stone. At length, the snapping turtle pulled its head back under water and turned ponderously to leave, its massive old shell covered with moss, lichen, algae, and the weight of years.
Thurston Pond has been a showplace for birds lately. It’s not unusual to see egrets plying the waters, wading slowly, fishing in water up to the tops of their legs. This week, though, I saw one wading in water deep enough to cover the base of its long neck. Whether it could still see into the water from that perspective, it looked like it was having fun. On the far side of the pond, a great blue heron warmed itself in the sun, collapsed like a Slinky.
Sue and I sat and watched Canada geese on the pond from a pondside bench, the birds nearly invisible when they faced us and their white patches flashing resplendent when they turned their backs. They milled about for a while, went dark, then turned their backs and suddenly reappeared, equidistantly spaced across the inlet by the pedestrian bridge. It was most impressive and looked practiced. With the autumn foliage hugging the pond and reflecting in the water, it would have made a good jigsaw puzzle.
9 October 2026