Depending on your age, you may not realize, or be able to accept, that eventually life will come to this: A pumpkin may become more important than the collapse of the Greek economy.

“You can’t stop it,” says Lovada Lambright, who has made that discovery about aging in the past 1-1/2 years.

That’s why, on a blustery October day, Lambright was standing outside at the Gardens at Juanita Bay, showing her giant pumpkin on Tuesday.

She really has two stories, however.

One is about the pumpkin. The other is about her, her life, or, in a sense, the lives of about 70 million people around her age.

She’s 70.

Over the next few years, millions of people commonly known as “baby boomers” will experience events that will have an inevitable outcome.

“I wonder what’s going to happen to me,” she said, as everyone does. Then she added:”It’s the small things that make us smile.”

Of course, there’s a history that led to that conclusion, and for Lambright it included many of life’s common experiences.

She was born in Shelton, lived in such places as Olympia, Centralia, Puyallup and Seattle, married, had two kids, divorced. About 1-1/2 years ago, she was living on her own, at an apartment in Olympia, working in a department store, with her children in Monroe and California.

Then something happened, and Lambright can’t quite describe it, like a memory loss, although she didn’t require hospitalization and it’s not dementia, but the result was something hovering in the minds of everyone born in the ’40s or ’50s.

She couldn’t work. She couldn’t live alone. Without going into specifics, but somewhat bitterly, she arrived in Juanita, at the residence founded as the German Retirement Home in 1977 at 11853 97th Ave. N.E., which she now calls “a great place.”

Which leads to the pumpkin.

“They found I have a green thumb,” she said, and soon she was working with the groundskeepers, helping out.

Then on a nice day last spring, something very routine took place.

“I stuck my thumb in the ground and put in the seed,” she said, explaining that she’d just found the pumpkin seed on the ground, probably left by a bird.

The months passed. Remarkable events took place. The pumpkin vines spread from the tub where the seed was planted and sprawled across the garden. Four pumpkins appeared.

One was bigger than the others.

Now it’s fall. That big pumpkin nestles near a fence in the garden. Everyone who hefts it is certain it must weigh at least 30 pounds.

“Some of the residents, they’ll have family come through and say, ‘Oh, my gosh, where did that come from?'” said Lambright.

“It’s been fun,” she said. “It’s always a fun thing to do with kids, plant a seed and see what happens. It was a magic seed.”

Of course, Lambright adds that it’s also helped her make a significant discovery, about what’s important.

“Every day, I go out and look at it,” she said.