The Pumpkin Patch

It is night in the pumpkin patch and the autumn season has began to drift into the air like the first dead leaves falling from a tree.

The pumpkin page is huge, at least for this type of field in the Alsan area. Someone has been taking care of the area even though not many people inhabit the area. Some believe that it is haunted, and it is a great shame since the land is very fertile.

The pumpkins are still small. Some vines are still left over from last year's pickings that intertwine with the new growth. Even though not many people live in the area, all the pumpkins somehow are picked over and taken from their birth places by the time Halloween rolls around on the 31st. Some go to little shops in the north where lucky families are able to buy the biggest pumpkin on their block so that one night they may carve it out and create a frightening picture lighted by a single candle, just so the next morning the head of household removes the gouged pumpkin from their doorstep and deposit it in their backyard with he smell of singed pumpkin seed still hung in the air with the damp dew of the sunrise.

Such was life, and something that the little pumpkin sprite knew. Countless years she waited by the pumpkins- watching them grow, tilling the soil and making sure they each had a space to grow. She didn't understand why she did this every year. Never receiving a thank you nor receiving some sort of acknowledgement that she was there. Still, year by year she watched her precious pumpkins grow to be full orange beast s of the season to be slowly picked over by the humans to be taken to a loving home- for one evening.

The patch was so neat and tidy, she thought to herself. Very tidy, she prided herself. Each pumpkin resided in it's family made up of a row in the patch. There was plenty of room between each row for the sprite to walk down the aisles and examine each one from night to night (she only came out at night, that way most predators had already slunk back into the brush of the forest around the patch).

Many years ago, when she was still new to her job, the pumpkin sprite had built a fence made of the finest wood around her patch. Over the years, adults and humans alike jumped the boundary and the weather had began to destroy her precious fence. She looked at it now in the dim nightlight as she remembered as she dug each hole for the pegs. And yet, even though she was bothered by the dilapidation, she refused to rebuild it. She allowed the pumpkins on the edge of the boundary wrap their vines around the old pegs and make homes out of it for the duration of their short life spans.

Outside of the boundary on all sides was a field of tall grass. She didn't tend to this since it was not hers. Someone else must tend to it, she assumed, for sometimes in the summer when she awoke from her long Winter and Spring slumber, the grass had been cut down and tended to. Sometimes the grass was short enough so that she could see a well worn path leading from the northern corner of the patch into the forest and probably leading to a town of some sort.

After the circumventing field of grass, the forest began. Her little tree hole was in the southern corner of the area. Every night in the summer she would venture out with her watering can and fill it in the little pond that fell over the field and forest boundary. Back and forth she would water a row then fill the watering can, constantly tilling the soil and breathing life into the pumpkins.

On a night like this, when the air was getting crisp, the trees swayed back and forth and created a soft creaking from time to time. No wonder people thought this area was scary, but never in the time was she here did she ever believe that the area was haunted. Ideas like that were senseless and with no merit. She thought the light gray clouds that floated across the moon and the blue light that shone on the pumpkin patch was beautiful. Real wonderful nights were when a light fog or mist rolled in from the hills and blanketed over each pumpkin child and held it close until the morning light shooed it away back into the sky.

This year of the pumpkin patch would be no different than the ones before. However this year proved to be a very healthy and large group of children. She was proud of her own work, even though she knew no one else would be.

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