The Vegetable Garden
A Harold and Sallie story
I’ll be publishing Harold and Sallie stories in the order they were written. While one doesn’t have to read them in them in that order, it might help a little. This is the second story in the series.
Sallie darted around the flower plots, double checking that every hole had seeds in them. “I think we’re good!” For a small fairy, she had a loud voice. It carried across the yard to where Harold was working on a new table. He grinned and gave her a thumbs up.
They spent a few days planting the vegetable seeds and now, at Sallie’s insistence, working on a flower bed. Sallie had planned the flower bed to be along the front porch. She had also insisted on planting things along the path to the cabin. And of course, there would be flowers on all the windowsills. When they had been to the village, Sallie picked out marigolds, lavender, and pansies. “I love pansies! They are always smiling!”
Harold didn’t care for the flowers, but when he saw how excited Sallie had been about planting them, he figured why not?
For the vegetables, the roommates planned for onions, green beans, shallots, tomatoes, lettuce, potatoes, eggplant, zucchini, yellow squash, and corn. There was a small area for herbs. Sallie was excited about all the combining salads and vegetable dishes they could eat. Harold found some old cookbooks on a bookshelf and Sallie had been poring over them, taking notes.
When they had gone to the village for seeds, the pair got a few strange looks as they wandered around the store. Sallie perched on Harold’s shoulder and had fun pointing out what to buy. It had been a while since she had been in the village and she enjoyed watching Harold, who because of his hermit reputation, was out of his element. Sallie decided she was going to work on getting him into the village more often. The gracious lady helping them chuckled at the fact that Sallie was the one who picked everything out. She was used to seeing Harold in the village from time to time, but fairies and humans didn’t normally interact with each other.
Later, when Sallie asked about it, Harold just shrugged it off. “I have no use for the villagers. I visit my parents, buy supplies once or twice a year. I’m fine out here.” Harold tried asking Sallie when she was going to contact her family. It had been a couple of months since he had freed her from ‘that stupid tree’ (as she called it) and Sallie had made no move to contact her family as to her whereabouts. When pressed, her response was often, “There’s no hurry. They left me. They can find me.”
Harold stopped looking over the supply of seeds he had picked out and looked around. The roommates had made good progress in planting. He was looking forward to a successful harvest of vegetables later in the year. If he planned it right, he would sell a few items in the village and store and can the rest for winter.
There was the pig to think about. Harold purchased the pig from a farmer nearby. The farmer was going to show him how to slaughter the pig and then how to store the meat for the winter. With the meat and the vegetables, he would be ready to go for winter. From experience, Harold knew he would have to make at least one more trip to the village, but overall, he had everything he needed for winter.
At one point, he asked Sallie what fairies ate. Harold had already learned about Sallie’s disdain for meat. “What do you eat? Bugs?” That got a huge eye roll from Sallie.
“You are being silly. We eat flowers, plants and when you wasteful humans leave seeds all over, sometimes we even plant a vegetable or two. Are you going to make some more of that ginger ale or not?”
Once Sallie made it known that she wasn’t leaving, Harold worked on making her a small fairy-sized bed for her on one of the windowsills. He had the idea of building a small area just for her in the living room.
He was looking forward to the plants this year, and even the flowers. He realized that Sallie sticking around was probably the best thing that happened to him in a long while.