Joseph Bottum

The Midwest loves Christmas. Loves it with all the ingenuity in its mind and vigor in its limbs. Loves it with all the passion in its soul. All you need is a staple gun, a thousand feet of twinkly lights and, hey presto: a house roof bright enough to illuminate the season. Or guide a spacecraft down from Mars. Only Halloween can rival Christmas in the small cities, and rival is too strong a word. Better to say that Halloween is the only other holiday for which Midwesterners are willing to bring out their staple guns and inflatable lawn ornaments. But the effort is almost half-hearted, compared to Christmas.

Tall and thin — a little stooped, his moustache and the thatch of his hair starting to show a little white — Lowell Gerry was putting out pumpkins this past week. Dozens and dozens of the things: round ones and flattened ovals. Bright orange ones, as neon as DayGlo, and deeper colours edging toward a reddish brown. A range of albino pumpkins, too, like pale sickly ghosts. Like vegetable lepers. They seem to sell fairly well. Last Tuesday, before the first snow dusted eastern South Dakota over the weekend, two or three other shoppers stopped by in the 15 minutes I was there to look for a few of the harvest’s last green tomatoes. It’s Halloween, of course, that incites the pumpkin fervour. The town of Madison is not exactly tiny, by rural standards.

The summer motorboats still roared this past weekend, their wake roiling the Midwestern lakes. The days continue hot, for the most part, and the sun bright. But something in the lower angle of the light now speaks of the season’s falling off toward winter. Something a little more golden — tentative and ephemeral — than the summer sun. Something more Septemberish. Nonetheless, you could sit on the shore and watch the boats make their runs up and down the middle of the local South Dakota lakes — Lake Madison, Lake Herman — like mechanical salmon, determined to reach their final locks in the waning days. Like August behemoths, roaring their unwillingness to admit the season’s end. And who knows?

Chris Francis stopped by my table down at the Sundog coffee shop to chat for about 20 minutes last Friday, and he didn’t ask for my vote. Now, in the give and take of daily conversation — the ebb and flow of coffee-shop chatter in a small Midwestern town — lots of people don’t canvass for votes. But Chris is a Democratic candidate for one of the District 8 seats in the state legislature here in South Dakota, and he’s going to need all the support he can get when election day comes in November. The reason Chris didn’t ask may be that he assumed I already planned to vote against him, although I’ve only met the man once or twice when I stopped by the Brickhouse, the local arts centre he runs.