Party in the Pumpkin Patch

One day, when I was a young boy I was playing in my sand box. This would have been an October. I know this because the pumpkins in the garden were fat and heavy on the vine, and there were brown leaves covering the ground and brightly colored ones in the trees. It was some time in the late afternoon because I felt the need to be wearing my green parka that I had gotten for my birthday months before.
I was playing with my plastic green soldiers and having quite the time of things. General Patton had corralled a platoon of Nazi soldiers in a cave and was just about to exterminate the so-called uber menche when something caught my eye. It was not a big thing that caught my eye, not like an intensely bright flash of light or anything, no. This was nothing so obvious as say, a stray animal in the yard.
What caught my attention was just bigger than a dragonfly itself, floating along on the autumn breeze; dodging falling leaves that came into it's path. I would have thought that it was a dragonfly had it not been shining with a soft lavender light. I watched in rapt attention, frozen to the spot as the anomaly lazily made it's way towards the garden shed.
When the thing was out of sight, I quickly and quietly snuck behind the old brick shed. Many of the bricks had begun to flake off in the twenty years since my father and uncle built it at the edge of our lot. Bits of brick popped under my feet as I inched my way around the corner between the shed and the juniper bushes which edged much of the back yard.
As I sidestepped between the shed and bushes, I began to notice other softly glowing lights in the air above and ahead of me. They were floating around in the same lazy fashion as the lavender one that had first caught my attention. As I came around the corner between the bushes, the shed, and the dead sunflowers, I saw even more lights just sitting still.
Still as death, they sat upon the fence, upon the tree branches over head, upon the toadstools which grew under the shade of the old tree that had never quite gotten chopped down. There seemed to be a very high tension in the air; a feeling of anticipation. The lights were waiting for something to happen. They all seemed to be directing their attention at the great pumpkin patch in the middle of the garden. I too, was directing my attention at that great mass of green and orange in the middle of flowers and tomatoes and peppers. I wanted to know what was going to happen.
Just before dusk, a kind of hush fell over the whole world, as if everything on earth took a quick moment to reverence. The light was just beginning to fade when it happened. A golden light shot five feet straight up in the air from the very center of the pumpkin patch. When that happened it seemed that hundreds of the soft lights flew from everywhere, directly into the patch.
I was dumbfounded. I was flabbergasted. I was in absolute awe of what I was seeing. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled through the sunflowers to the edge of the pumpkin patch. I lowered my face until I could smell the dark loamy earth that was almost touching my chin.
I pushed aside a large leaf that was blocking my view, and was met with a sight that I had dreamt of, though never truly hoped to see in all of my seven years. I was suddenly privy to a faerie party. I could not even counted the number of tiny glowing, winged. womanlike creatures that were dancing upon the floor of my garden. There was a musical band of creatures that I now know are called brownies. In stark contrast to the nakedness of the faeries, the brownies wore leaves and rodent skins to cover their tiny wiry bodies. They played hand made instruments, such as a mole skin drum, a flute constructed from blades of grass, and many other such things. One brownie who wore a chipmunk skin which dragged on the ground behind him, was playing what looked like some sort of banjo made from tree fungus.
There were brownies and faeries dancing and playing in every corner of the patch. They ducked behind leaves, playing hide and seek with one another, or danced in great circles of light. The faeries were not the only ones to shed light upon the floor of the pumpkin patch. On the underside of the great canopy of leaves there were hundreds and hundreds of lightning bugs emitting their own bio luminescence to light up the evening.
One of the faeries, a brightly glowing pink one, noticed me watching and flew up to my face. Everything stopped. I was frozen, the band was frozen, all of the partiers save one who wasn't paying attention were frozen. I was terrified. I didn't know what this tiny glowing thing was capable of. I had no idea what it could do to me. The only idea that I did have was that I might be soiling myself if I lived.
She did not turn me into a frog, not into a newt, nor into a fine mist to be blown away on the slightest breeze. She smiled at me and put her hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle, then she kissed me on the nose. Instantly, I was reshaped to the size of one of the brownies. I have no words for how it felt that evening, to be walking through my own pumpkin patch and seeing the pumpkins tower over me like great behemoths of orange halloweenness. I looked down and saw a grub that was to me, the size of a football.
My faerie laughed at my reaction to everything, then taking me by the hand led me out into the party. The band struck up a new song and we began to dance. We danced in circles that weaved in and out of each other in ever increasingly complex patterns. I laughed and jumped and twirled in the air with my new friends. I couldn't understand anything that was said around me, but I was given the sense that I did not have to fear anything among these people. I felt absolutely carefree in a way that I have never been able to recapture.
After far too short a time, I heard my mother's voice calling me in for supper. I stopped dancing and walked to the edge of the pumpkin patch. My pink faerie followed. At the edge of the patch, she took me by the hand and kissed my forehead. As quickly as I had shrunk to brownie size, I returned to my natural state.
I looked down for a last glimpse of my faerie, but all I saw was a brief flash of pink light receding back into the leaves and pumpkins. I smiled and ran into the house to tell my family everything that had just happened to me out in the pumpkin patch over a nice hot meal.