How one neighbor turned a pumpkin surplus into a donation drive

As Norah Meier-Maroulis looks out onto her yard, a neighbor on a run stops and gestures toward the sea of reds, oranges and yellows in front of her home.

“What a gift to the neighborhood, you doing this. My kids love it,” he says.

He is referring to the piles of pumpkins, ranging in size from the palm of a hand to a car tire, stacked waist-high. They cover almost half of her yard and go all the way up her driveway. Inconvenient? Sure, but the pumpkins won’t be there for long.

This is the third year Meier-Maroulis has used her yard as a donation site for My Pig Filled Life, a rescue pig farm in Wills Point. She was first introduced to the organization a couple years ago after rescuing a potbelly pig that had been severely sexually assaulted. A friend connected her with Melanie Moreau at My Pig Filled Life, who helped her save the pig’s life and get him adopted.

From there, the two became friends, and Moreau told Meier-Maroulis about how My Pig Filled Life had drop-off locations around DFW for people to donate pumpkins, which are used to feed the pigs at the farm. Meier-Maroulis offered up her driveway, expecting no more than a couple hundred pumpkins.

That first year, the entire driveway was filled within four weeks. Last year, the piles began spilling out into her yard. This year, Meier-Maroulis intended to collect for only two weeks, but her yard filled up after a little over a week. She had to put signs up saying she could no longer collect pumpkins.

The influx peaked the weekend after Thanksgiving, when neighbors were transitioning from fall decorations to Christmas displays. Meier-Maroulis says it was “like a carpool,” with cars lining the street to drop their pumpkins off. The drop-off has become a family affair.

“The whole family will come, maybe grandma and mom and dad, and the kids are pulling a cart full of pumpkins to drop off. And we sit here and we watch it all from the window, and it’s just the cutest thing,” Meier-Maroulis says.

Each year, neighbors walking by will stop to take pictures of their kids or dogs posing with the pumpkins. Meier-Maroulis says the collection has allowed her to meet neighbors from streets away whom she has never crossed paths with.

“I’m very thankful that people are so happy about it, and I will tell you, it brings us so much joy, and I think it brings a lot of the neighbors joy,” she says.

Once the collection period ends, Meier-Maroulis organizes a day for volunteers to come together and load the pumpkins up for transport to Wills Point. This year, a group of around 130 volunteers filled three 30-yard dumpsters with the haul, including local students and Scouting America troops.

“It’s really been a whole community effort to do this,” Meier-Maroulis says.

But for her, the work starts even before it’s time to load up the dumpsters. Each day, Meier-Maroulis comes out to inspect the pumpkins, ensuring any rotten ones are removed and that the piles are not spilling out onto the sidewalk or street. The work continues into the spring, when new pumpkins start sprouting and must be picked out.

Though the rescues at My Pig Filled Life still need feed, the pumpkins serve as a supplement, offsetting the farm’s feed costs by tens of thousands of dollars. Last year, the pumpkins lasted through early March. The donations also keep the pumpkins out of the landfill, another reason Meier-Maroulis continues to offer her yard each year.

The pumpkin donation is just one of many ways Meier-Maroulis is involved in animal rescue. She runs the Educational Animal Rescue Society and has been doing rescue work in Dallas for more than 20 years. It started one day after she moved to Dallas after college. While driving down Singleton Boulevard, she saw two stray dogs in the middle of the road. She picked them up and got them vetted and adopted on her own, as the shelter and SPCA were both full. Soon after, she created the Facebook group Dallas Strays and Rescues, which still functions as a hub for adoptions, lost pets and rescue resources.

“You meet everybody along the way,” she jokes. “You’re friends with a squirrel rescuer, you’re friends with a pig rescuer, you’re friends with the horse rescuer.”

Helping with the pumpkin drop-off is one way for her to support those in the rescue community, especially during hard times. Meier-Maroulis says the post-pandemic years have been hard on the community, with donations, fosters and volunteer numbers down.

“It’s a small thing that we can do to make a big impact,” she says.