Squash-house Valley
It’s autumn again. Autumn means harvest time. This would not be unusual if part of the harvest were not pumpkins. Many pumpkins are quite normal but some grow as big as houses. They are wonderful to live in. Every family here lives in a pumpkin. At harvest time, of course, the giant pumpkins stay in their place, which becomes the new property of a family.
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Note for guardians and readers.
The Valley of the Pumpkin Houses is a series of stories about children, especially Charly, who live in pumpkin houses.
The stories revolve much around village life, nature, and agriculture. Themes of alternative supply and disposal are also a natural part of the stories, without inciting a climate change or conservation movement. People live in their gourds because that’s the way it is, and because they live in a remote valley, have sun, wind, water and nature, and a low population density, they try to produce everything locally when it makes sense. The issue of self-sufficient supply is always topical with all rural communities. In countries or regions with unstable grid development anyway. It’s not lecturing and it’s more about how many bees you need for a liter of honey and how dangerous it can be to install a photovoltaic system on a pumpkin by yourself. That pumpkin plants can seasonally interfere with well-worn paths may bring the reader inclined to profundity to adventurous philosophical defeats. At some point, every child wonders where his or her sewage ends up. Here in microcosm, it will also have to be plausible somehow. It should be entertaining and easy to read and read aloud. Again, bees are great as long as you don’t step on them.
Introduction
Pumpkins are great. They grow up quickly, the plants have large flowers and leaves, and when you want to harvest them, you do not have to dig or climb the tree. From your flesh you can make soup, eat it for salad or bake a pie. From some types of pumpkin, the seeds are pressed and the oil is used as salad oil. Birds also like to eat pumpkin seeds and the cows and bills on the farms also like to eat pumpkin. Funny faces can be carved from the shell and lit up for Halloween. This fits well because the pumpkin harvest always takes place in the fall and that’s when Halloween is. All hallows’ eve. The night before the feast for all the saints and prayer for the ancestors. But also a thanksgiving for the harvest and the time when the farm animals come back to the barns for the winter. The animals that were eaten were completely used and also burned their bones and the ashes contained valuable fertilizer for the vegetable gardens. Everything went and came back in some form and made sense. The bonfires were also where scary stories were told. Stories that were especially scary when a candle flickered inside a pumpkin that had a grimace cut into it.
Charly knows the problem of pumpkin harvesting all too well. He can´t lift the big pumpkins in the valley where he lives. No one can, because they are as big as houses. And if a pumpkin in the valley grew as big as a house, then a house was made out of it. That is a lot of work but making any house is work. The giant pumpkins grow only here in Charlie’s Valley and nowhere else in the world. You can’t see it, you can’t know beforehand if a pumpkin was going to grow into a giant pumpkin.
Maybe it is because of the seeds of the pumpkins. At least not when other seeds were planted here. The pumpkins stayed small. Never has a pumpkin from the valley been planted elsewhere as a seed or young plant. Already many thieves have tried to steal pumpkin seeds to try again. But the valley has two policemen who had caught every thief red-handed so far. That was easy. The valley has only one exit and the seeds are processed into pumpkin seed oil in the oil mill, which is powered by the force of the water. The policeman and his brother lives with their families in the mill, whose water power is used to produce electricity on the remaining days of the year.
The policeman was actually a detective superintendent from the town 30 miles away. When his brother, the miller had broken an arm while mountain climbing and could not work, he helped him during the harvest and in grinding pumpkin seeds. His family was delighted. The children could play almost everywhere.
There are no cars directly in the village, because at the entrance of the village has a parking lot, created for the residents, visitors and suppliers. This was necessary, because every year some pumpkins grew into giant pumpkins and their stalks, branches and leaves grew crisscross that the roads, which then sometimes could not be driven on. Every year it looks different in the valley and the paths are mostly made of sand. Only where many pumpkin houses are already close together, solid surfaces are built, like on the village square or in the pumpkin alley. No new pumpkin should grow on the village square, that was decided unanimously, so that one have a place, which one always have for celebrations, the weekly market and for emergencies, if nevertheless times a car has to go up to here. The pumpkin alley is an alley with small and large houses growing close to and into each other on both sides. This was not planned either. They all grew in a single year.
Often in the evening, the villagers meet at the pub. The children have their own play pumpkin. This is handy when it rains or snows outside. The pumpkins are not only extra large, they didn’t mind the frost and snow. Nevertheless, the houses have to be cared for. Every five years, the homeowners approach with friends and neighbors, and wax the house. They polish the gourd with beeswax made from old honeycombs of honeybees. This helps prevent cracks in the hard shell and water and ice from settling there. Moss, which gradually formed on the side of the gourd protected from the wind, also could not stick to it when it was waxed. To wax a house needs 5 large buckets of wax. That’s as much as a quarter of a million bees produce here in the valley each year. That doesn’t sound like much, but each year more houses are being waxed and the older houses have to be waxed sometimes every other year.
The many millions of bees are not even noticed in the valley, even though everything is buzzing and humming. Everything is full of blossoms until late in the fall and the winter is only short here. The bees have everything they need. Only to fertilize the squash blossoms, a great many bees has to collect pollen and carry it on. The flowers are bigger than Charly’s father. In the meadows everything is full of flowers and flowering herbs and the fruit trees are also fragrant and blooming. On the roadsides there are bushes with berries. The bees also needwd them for their blossoms.
No one who lives here, wants to leave. Except the mayor. Only a few knöw why he wants to leave.
The valley nestled long and with rolling green hills with meadows and forests against high mountains that almost completely blocks it from the outside world. The highest mountain is Mount Courntey at 5,300 feet. This is not high, but the mountain range is too steep to simply walk over.
In the valley is a lake, the Dark Lake. It is called that because it was very deep and in some places most of it is shaded by the mountains. But it is also called that because there are dark stories about it. Strange animals, especially very old and big fish that became legends because people only thought they had seen them or almost caught them. Other animals everyone in the valley know. There is the old Smitty, the paddlefish. He must be 8 ft long and has a snout like a paddle. He often swims around the mill and even let people feed him by hand. But there is also talk of a huge white sturgeon that is supposed to be 3 times the size of Smitty. He was rarely seen and is only in the lake for a short time each year.
The valley is divided by a small river, the Dark River. It is only called that because it flows through Dark Lake. There is nothing dark about the river at all. It is shallow, at least in the area of the village square, and does not flow fast. It has bays with aquatic plants that also blooms. Its bottom is gravelly in places where the water flows faster and sandy where there is a cove or a bend. The meadows go right down to the water. There are only two bridges in the valley. One is a narrow wooden bridge for pedestrians. The other is at the mill and is also too narrow for cars. Therefore there are two small cars on the other side of the Dark River.
There are far fewer pumpkin houses on the mill side than on the village side. No one knows why. But Charlie’s family’s house is here. And not just anywhere. It is on top of a hill above the mill. From here you can almost see the whole village, the river, and part of Dark Lake. Behind Charlie’s pumpkin are pastures. The farmers brought their cows there to graze and they stay there most of the year unless there is a sudden onset of winter. Behind them the mountains steep again, and right by the river a forest begins that goes up to the mountains in a side valley and becomes more and more gloomy. In the forest there are wild animals and different birds than in the rest of the valley. And there are mushrooms. Lots of mushrooms, which are also a bit too big. Mushroom season is actually more than half the year, but the best time is from September to November. That’s when it is still warm in the forest and it got wetter. It rains more in the forest than in the main valley anyway. The clouds drift up to the mountains and rain there. Often you can see a rainbow over the forest.
Charly is not often in the forest. What should he be doing there? His friends live in the village and even though the village has only 470 inhabitants, there is actually always something going on there. Whoever claims that you have to go to the forest to climb, or to build tree houses, has never climbed around on a gigantic pumpkin plant, in the sunshine, high above a flower meadow.
Squash-house Valley 1
Squashhouse Valley 1 Harvest time Charly sat high up on his pumpkin, with his back leaning against the ten feet sawed-off stalk. From here, he could overlook the whole village, as his pumpkin was situated on a small hill. It was early fall and everyone in the village knew what that meant. Harvest time. When it was harvest time in other villages, the fruits from garden and field were stored, eaten, sold. That also happened here in the village. Potatoes just didn’t go into the cellar, because there were no cellars here. What for. When the harvest was over in the other villages and they were preparing for winter, the pumpkin village was busy. After the harvest came the construction time. It took very good tools and a lot of time to carve a good house out of a good pumpkin. Hollowing out was tedious and time-consuming. Sawing and drilling openings in the hard outer wall of the pumpkin was hard work. But it was worth it. With good care, such a pumpkin house lasts forever. The oldest house in the village was three hundred and seventy-three years old. Of course, that house was also a pumpkin, as were all the houses in the village. The village came into being in the first place because giant pumpkins grow here. You never know how many there are in a year that grow to a large enough size to become a house. There was one year when there were nine, all in a somewhat remote location. An independent, small settlement was formed. Mostly, however, there are only three to five pumpkins that are added in a year. Some, somewhat smaller ones, can also be used for storage if they have grown in the right place. The village council pays close attention to make sure no pumpkins grow where they are not wanted, because they would be in the way or change the village image. Charly lived with his parents and siblings in an old pumpkin that they had inherited from his grandmother. Inherited is the wrong word, because his grandma just moved away. “I can’t see pumpkins anymore and the mayor is getting on my pumpkin,” were her last words before she moved to New York City to spend her twilight years doing more opera, museums and urban bustle. Charly and his parents loved to move. They loved the outdoors and his parents are self-employed. His mother is an architect and travels a lot anyway when she has a job. His father does something with internet and mostly in front of the computer. Everyone in the village has Internet access. At least in the main village. Here on the hill, there is no power line going here, nor is there a water or sewer line. Electricity comes to Charly’s family from a water wheel in the nearby creek. So does the water. Dirty water is cleaned up at a plant, and internet and television are available through a satellite dish attached to the stalk of the pumpkin Charly was leaning against. Susi and Johnny were coming up the hill. Lasse had already seen them as they came out of their pumpkins. Hello, Charly, Susi called up to him. “At your favorite place, as usual.” “I’m coming down, Charly called and jumped up. Charly went to the flap in the pumpkin roof and ran down the two flights of stairs through the open hall in the pumpkin. He called out to his father, who was at his desk, “We’re going pumpkin picking.” “Have fun,” the father said. “We’ll catch up with you when your mom gets back from town”. Charly dashed out the front door. The door stand, as with most pumpkin houses on warm days always open. Like the openings for the windows, the openings for the doors were sawed out of the hard shell of the pumpkin. This was done in the pumpkin village by the carpenter. In the past, he had only worked with wood. Since he lived here, pumpkin shell was his building material, at least most of the time. All called the village Pumpkin Village in the Squashhouse Valley. Charly could have slid down from the roof of the pumpkin, because the pumpkin house was quite flat. But he would have fallen down the last piece and that was higher than he was and therefore forbidden and much too dangerous. Stupid Michel did it once and was still in the hospital. Stupid Michel was the son of the mayor. He was like his father. Very loud and always wanted everyone to hear what he said, did and thought. This summer he didn’t notice much himself, because he was in the hospital. Charly and his friends often visited him there. There in the city from houses that were not pumpkins. Everything was straight there. The streets, the houses, the rooms. It smelled like the city and not pumpkin like here. Today they would see Michel again, because he was healthy again and did not want to miss the harvest of the giant pumpkin. After all, his father, the mayor would also give a long speech and Michel was also eager to get on the photo that would then appear in the newspaper and on the Internet. Charly Susi and Johnny ran across the meadows down the hill. The sun was shining, it was warm for the early autumn. The path they were walking on was sand. There were apple trees to the left and right, but they were no longer bearing apples. In the pastures, which had no fences here, there were a few cows standing and grazing while it was not yet too cold and there was still fresh green growing. Here on this side of the river there were few pumpkin houses and they mostly stood alone or had a pumpkin shed or garage. At the old water mill, the kids stopped. As usual. Of course, the mill where grain used to be ground into flour