For years, my youngest daughter has belonged to a cult of pumpkin carvers. These young people take great pride in the production of Jack-O-Lanterns at Halloween, even to the point of purchasing special sets of pumpkin-carving tools to work with. They even have contests to choose the most intricate and scariest of their productions, which are sometimes accompanied by props, such as hers was this year.

In addition to carving a web across half the pumpkin, which really looked scary when she placed a lighted candle therein, she made huge black tarantula-looking spiders out of pipe cleaners that were clinging to the sides of the web, just waiting for an unwary victim to get close enough for them to get their fangs into. You didn’t even want to go into the same room with it!

A few days after Halloween, she set the pumpkin out on the back porch to await the sad fate of Jack-O-Lanterns the world over: I was to set it out with the rest of the garbage that week, on collection day.

That day rolled around, and I got the garbage together from the rest of the house, took it to the kitchen door, and was fixing to take it out onto the back porch, but fortunately I glanced out there first, and froze. At the foot of the chaise lounge, its black and white fur rippling softly in the morning breeze, reclined a skunk!

We have always had skunk problems in the country; comes with the territory, so to speak. Once Betsy went across the covered walkway to our guest house, “The Store,” for something at night, and when she opened the door to return, a skunk sat in the middle of the boardwalk, regarding her nonchalantly. She yelled for someone in the house (me or Adam) to come to the rescue, but I was reading in the den, with the stereo up loud enough for me to hear, which means loud enough for the neighbors to listen, too, if they want to. She ended up spending most of an hour besieged in The Store, and was sho’nuff hot at me for not coming to the aid of a fair damsel in distress, no matter that I had no idea the fair damsel was in any distress atall.

Labrador Boo once chased a skunk away from entering the back porch, but the skunk took offense and sprayed both Boo and the porch, which meant bathing both in tomato juice several times over the next week. We decided it might have been cheaper to let the skunk walk through the screen porch undisturbed. I know Boo concurred.

Yet here was a skunk apparently napping on the kitchen end of a 50-foot-long screen porch. I couldn’t get out the door without arousing it, though I could see the close screen door hadn’t been pulled closed the night before. Yet shooting him there was unthinkable. Skunks don’t take kindly to shooing, either. What to do?

I turned and went through the house to the garage door, and slipped outside there. Going to the door from the garage onto the back porch, I gently eased that door open and propped it with an anti-freeze jug. I peered in, but could barely see the black and white fur rippling on the other side of the chaise lounge. I turned and exited the garage, slipped around to the screen door from the porch onto the boardwalk to The Store, and eased it open, taking the spring loose, so it would stay thataway. Now the two doors at the other end of the porch from the skunk were open for its exit, if I could arrange that.

Okay, now I needed to open the screen door opposite the kitchen, which was only maybe ten feet from the reclining skunk. Using the rosebush for cover, I snuk silently toward the visitor, knowing that if it was aroused, the screen would give little protection from the stinking spray. For the last few feet, once I had to leave the rosebush’s cover, I went to hands and knees. Finally, I was at the screen door. I reached out and snagged the bottom of the door with my fingernails and began to ease it open, peeping fearfully at where the skunk rested as the door gradually swung to reveal the black and white fur… that from this close appeared to be more grayish. Maybe an old skunk? I eased the door more open, squinting with concentration. The fur WAS pretty gray.

Then I saw it had an orange base, barely visible.

Pumpkins, when set out unattended in the Southern heat and humidity for several days, produce the most beautiful mold, fully two inches of hair-like fungus that starts out rather tarantula-black at the base, but gets lighter as it gets longer, becoming almost white.

I gathered up the remains, for the garbage truck, then went to beat my daughter.