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It’s peak color season and she’s more unsettled than the pile of leaves she threw in the air for her Instagram last week.
“Todddddd, I’m boredddddddd,” she says like a needy Yorkshire Terrier begging for attention while Todd tries to settle in for the Michigan game.
He looks down at her as she hangs on his arm. “Why? The game just started! This is awesome!”
“All we’ve done lately is sit around and watch football,” she explains. Todd rolls his eyes because he knows what’s coming. He knows she wants to go to a farm and drink cider. He knows she wants to go on a hayride and carve pumpkins. He knows he’s about to partake in all the stereotypical fall activities that riddle his newsfeed.
Struggling to get her point across, she begins to explain, “Ugh, I don’t know, I just see people doing all these fun things. Like Caroline went to a cider mill where they played with animals and took hayrides and ate pumpkin donuts. It. Looked. Amaze.”
Taking to her phone while Todd fervently attended to his group text during the game, she finds a “Fall Y’all” party located at a farm that’s a 45-minute drive outside of the city.
“Todd! It’s next week! Can we go?!”
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” he says in passing while the refs review the spot on a big 3rd & 1.
“YAAAAS!” she screams giddily.
Pulling it out of the Nordstrom bag, Todd nicely called into the bathroom while she gets ready for the big day on the farm. “Babe, do I seriously have to wear this? Why are there patches on the elbows of this sweater?”
She sticks her head out of the bathroom and gives him a look that confirms that he will, in fact, be wearing the sweater until the end of the day trip. While he puts it on, she exits the bathroom fully-dressed and ready to farm hard.
Wearing brown suede button-down underneath a down navy blue vest, her dark wash jeans are covered by high-rising rubber boots, all topped off with a red plaid scarf perfectly draped over her shoulders and around her neck.
“Ha, you kind of look like Han Solo,” Todd says with a shit-eating grin on his face.
“Are you kidding me right now? Is that from fucking Star Trek or something? Never mind. I don’t have time for this. Let’s go.”
Arriving at the farm a little after noon, it smells of barnyard animals and pig feed rather than hot cider and fresh donuts. Tiptoeing through mud and what smells like cow poop, she goes up to a small stand on one side of the pumpkin patch to ask when the next hayride around the farm is.
“‘Bout an hour from now,” the attendant tells her while Todd reassures her that it isn’t that long of a wait. He convinces her to go inside and look around while they wait for it to arrive.
They sit down at a small table in the farm’s cafe area and order exactly what she came for — cider and donuts. After explaining to Todd that the pumpkin donuts are fine for her diet because pumpkin is paleo, Todd asks the waitress for a glass of hard cider rather than hot apple cider. Even though she also wants to get a slight buzz before getting on the back of the tractor, she’s already planned out every step of her “Cutely Holding Steamy Cider While Standing In Front Of The Pumpkins With Her Head Looking Downward” Instagram, so she opts for the warmer choice.
After spending seven minutes attempting to take a neatly organized overhead table shot of their order, Todd suggests they make their way to the barn to feed the farm animals. Disgusted by the goats, cows, chickens, and sheep, Todd confusingly asks what type of animals she was actually expecting to be on the farm.
“I don’t know, Todd, these just smell awful,” she says nasally while holding her nostrils shut with two fingers. “Let’s go over to the pumpkins.”
Quickly walking ten feet ahead of Todd, he wonders why she’s so eager to get to the gourds before realizing that her distance is intentional. Realizing that she’s trying to get a “natural” photo in the most picturesque part of the patch. Pulling his phone out of his pocket, he begins attempting to snap photos while she aimlessly looks into the distance as if she’s part of a professional shoot. Acting as though she’s picking out the perfect pumpkin, she wanders up and down the aisles patch twirling her hair and looking back to make sure Todd has his phone out.
After taking enough photos to fill an entire photo stream, she asks Todd to see his phone and scrolls through all of them with a glowing smile across her face. While texting them to herself, she looks up at him and says, “Alright, we can go home now.”
Puzzled, he explains that the hayride is going to start in five minutes before she responds, “Eh, I don’t really want to do it anymore,” while deciding how many leaves Emojis to include in her caption.
“Alright, fine, let’s go,” he says while they head back to his Tahoe for the trip home. Sitting in the passenger seat, they spend the next 45 minutes in silence while her head is buried in her phone before she breaks up the monotonous drive with a question.
“What about this photo?” she inquires while holding her phone up.
“Uh, yeah, that one’s good, babe.” .
Image via Shutterstock
Respond
Will
Will (Twitter / Instagram) is the host of The Sunday Scaries Podcast.
@willdefries
@willdefries
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will@grandex.co
I’d take the pair of Han Solos on the right for a ride on my Millennium Falcon.
hereby nominated for gif of the week
Not knowing the difference between a gif and a meme. PGP
The comment has to be a moving picture for it to qualify for the weekly gif competition. The pictures with captions are commonly referred to as “memes.”
^ He’s right
I was hoping she was going to find some pics on Todd’s phone of a girl that isn’t her.
I think that’s exactly what happened. Todd probably didn’t look away from the road (like the safe driver he is) and responded automatically. Probably a photo from the guys weekend in Sea Island.
But that would mean she texted herself that picture. As much as I want to believe she saw it when she was texting the other pictures to herself and was going to “spring a trap” on him, I don’t think she’s that clever.
I read these hoping to see a break up and terrified I’ll see a proposal.
What if she gets tired of Todd waiting forever and she proposes to Todd herself?
Then he needs to shoot her with a silver bullet and put a stake in her heart, just in case.
I am still scarred from Topenga proposing to Corey. I don’t think I could handle that type of role reversal again, once was enough.
At least he didn’t miss the Michigan game…
Went to (read: was forced to go to) the pumpkin patch last weekend. Some 8-year-old kid laid claim to the pumpkin she wanted, and I could tell she was annoyed. I then made the mistake of a lifetime by calling her out on it.
How’s single life?
We know you are Todd, Will
I don’t think there are any pumpkin patches like this near Austin. Don’t ask how I know.
We’re all Todd
Would love to read about an encounter where she, Todd, and both their groups of respective friends all go out together for a night on the town. Seems like that would end in a beautiful shit storm.
Todd is just a prop in her pitiful attempt at attention.
Just going through the motions at this point, trying not to mess up.
Fuck.
The most accurate part of this is the dead eyed stare
The fact that she doesn’t know Ha Solo is from Star Wars should be grounds for a break up.