Cool or Not Cool: Throwing Out Someone Else’s Stoop Pumpkin

Traditionally, my daughter starts lobbying to get a pumpkin to carve for Halloween sometime around Labor Day, and usually I summon enough fortitude to hold her off till well into October. (“Kid, you know by now that if you get and carve them too early, pumpkins will rot and get moldy and squirrels will gnaw on them.”) This year I gave in a couple of weeks early, because, as they say in the parenting books, you have to choose your battles I am weak and tired.

Thanks to a Halloween miracle, I located one of those “safe” pumpkin carving tools that, I admit, take the thrill out of Halloween by eliminating the risk of ending up in the Emergency Room with a sliced dorsal digital vein.

So she carved the thing, and because she has a taste for the macabre, she wanted to turn some of the pumpkin goo into blood spilling out of its mouth, but it had to be red, which we accomplished by mixing up the gunk with red food coloring. It looked pretty gnarly, which was the point.

Just a couple of days later, I draw the conclusion that food coloring must have sugar in it, bc the carved pumpkin is now crawling with tiny flies, like a gourd version of that head on a pike in Lord of the Flies. Which actually upped the creepy factor quite nicely. It’s not moldy, I see no squirrel teeth marks, and its mouth hasn’t fallen in on itself, but it is crawling with flies.

Couple more days go by, I walk out the door, and the infested pumpkin is gone. Without a trace. So I assume my husband had tossed it in the compost bin, or even my daughter chucked it, grossed out by the mini-swarm feasting on caramelized pumpkin guts.

But nope, nobody in our family. And not some hooligan who just smashed it on the sidewalk to be a dick because, as I mentioned, gone without a trace. (and because, ya know, it’s Park Slope) Someone had taken it upon his/herself to remove the perceived blight.

What’s the verdict? Did this self-appointed anonymous neighborhood improvement superhero do the right thing? Or do we have the right to display bug-riddled squash on our stoop until Christmas?