We have a small compost pile where I threw last years pumpkins, I don't remember throwing gourds there but I could have. I've got these really strange looking things growing up over there. For some reason they make us laugh every time we look at them. They sort of look like pumpkins, but are bright yellow. They are way to big to be a squash, and by far the largest gourds I've ever seen. I call them gourdkins. They are slowly edging towards the house, I joke with Patrick that they are like the pods in that old movie “Invasion of the body snatchers”, he laughs so hard about it. It freaks my native New Yorker mother out though. This from a woman who wouldn’t think twice about trudging us kid through Jamaica Queens at 11:00 pm. That woman will not go near a corn field...not since Children of the Corn, anyway.

I am trying so hard to fit into what I perceive as the whole "Vermont life-style" (my entire family has given me up for a nut). I try and grow my very own victory garden every year. I am in my glory every spring. I have never had the opportunity to grow anything before Brattleboro. I grew up in Tenements in NYC. We didn’t even have a flower box on our fire-escape. Anyway, last year I thought moon flowers mixed with my morning glories would be soooo beautiful, so I planted the seeds, and the glories really were beautiful...but where the moon flowers were supposed to be, were some sort of bean. I waited and waited, but they never did flower. I swear I did not plant beans! Such is my life. These sort of things happen to me all the time, my neighbors just roll their eyes (yes, they think I’m nuts too.) every time they pass my little plot of dirt.

A very unreliable source told me that yes they do cross-breed, but he also had me believing (just for a minute) that jackalopes were real.

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Update: the images...