“Why?” Jamie’s small voice barely carried past the front hall.

    “Because we don’t have a babysitter this morning.”

    “Why?” The little girl’s voice sung the word.

    “Because your sitter has to help her parents on their farm today, just like when you are old enough, you’ll have small chores to do with us.”

    “Why?” she asked again.

    “Because good boys and girls help their parents with the chores,” her mother answered, and once again thrust a pair of old, well-worn boots at her.

    Her mother gave her an unblinking, unmoving stare and, using her superior height, loomed over her.

    “Fine.”

    James, her twin, sat in a chair across from her, kicking his feet, which swung high off the ground from his perch.  He paid her no attention. He flapped his lips, making fake motor sounds for the airplane in his hands. Outside, her father pled freshly-harvested vegetables into the wheelbarrow. She helped him bundle them up the night before by counting out the stalks of greens for each little wrap of twine.

    “Why are we getting rid of them?” she had asked.

    “We’re not getting rid of them, baby girl, we need to trade them for oil,” her father had answered. 

    Jamie pulled on her boots with a two-handed tug. They squeezed her toes when she walked in them and it was a long walk from where they lived to the farm stand. She looked at her mother to say more, but her mother already strode out the door and muttered about “running late.”

    The siblings followed behind their parents, weaving left and right along the road as they walked. Jamie found a stick, then James, younger than her by just a few minutes, traded his toy plane for the newness of her stick. His previous prized possession sat forgotten in her father’s wheelbarrow. He ran and stopped, ran and stopped, over and over again finding something interesting every few minutes to poke at.

    Sunlight peaked through the boughs of the trees, but had not yet crested the tall tops when they set out. They lived on the south side of the small town, and the old man lived far to the north. She didn’t understand why they couldn’t just give things back and forth with the people who lived closer.

    Piles of pine needles half-hid a pine cone which she picked up and then traded for her stick. She poked at ridges and peaked into the dark cracks as they walked. Chipmunks scurried to and from their holes. Her attention drifted towards and away from her parents’ conversation. They looked back occasionally as they walked, ensuring the kids stayed with them. There wasn’t much of anywhere to go on the road. It was straight, and the side roads were overgrown by grass and small trees.

    “He does better than we do,” her father said.

    He used the same tone he used when Jamie did something wrong, and she listened more closely.

    “When he gets older someone else will get the land,” her mother said.

    “Just don’t make sense. He lives all alone; he must be one.”

    “He isn’t one. The pastor checked him and he isn’t one. Not a hint of an Abnormal in him.”

    “Are we there yet?” James asked.

    “No,” her father answered in a hard tone. “Now come on. Keep up.”

    Her father picked up the pace, taking slightly longer strides throwing back pine needles with each step. Their tiny legs pumped twice as fast as their parents just to keep pace. Jamie stopped when she saw their destination up on her right by the side of the road.

    “Why does it look like a church?” she asked.

    “It’s not a church,” her father said.

    He walked toward the red-roofed building with its colored shiny glass tiles which were protected from the weather by the angle of overhanging roof. It had a tall arched roof which glowed a warm copper in the sun and looked inviting the way the church did.

    “But why does it look like one?” she asked.

    No adult answered her. Her brother held her mother’s hand up ahead, and her mother called to her without looking back over her shoulder.

    “Come on.”

    Jamie followed as they led the way past the unexplained building and its overgrown shrubbery piled up around the white sign out front. She couldn’t read well yet, but she could make out some of the letters and words. One of them said “home,” but she didn’t know the first big word.

    “What kind of home is this?” she asked.

    “Where old man Mills lives,” her mother answered before becoming completely absorbed by another pair of adults already there.

    Jamie remembered Mr. and Mrs. Stott. Her mother and father talked about them sometimes using the same inflections as they did when James was in trouble. Whenever her mother saw them though, she made a noise like teakettle, whining out her “hello.” Jamie didn’t understand why adults acted so strange. She wandered past her mother down the path.

    “Don’t go too far ahead. Stay with your father.”

    Where trees had been cleared away, years back, a lane of mulched pine chips, soft underfoot and damp, led behind the angled roof and over the long metal lines on the ground. Dad said giant machines called trains used to ride them but didn’t anymore. Her dad told a lot of strange stories about metal things on roads and metal things in the sky during her bedtime stories. He said planes and cars used to move, and he liked to talk about his poor’sha. She didn’t know what that meant but he talked about it like it was important. She liked her scary bedtime stories better. Those made more sense because monsters in those stories used the dark like the monsters in real life. She threw things up into the sky all the time and they always fell back down, and bigger things were harder to move than smaller things. Maybe adults forgot the magic that lived in the metal things, so they didn’t work anymore?

    After the metal lines, another small arch of trees partially obscured the view before they walked through to Old Man Mill’s farm. Plastic arches ran the length of a large open field. Her dad had one. He called it a polytunnel and said they were used to protect plants from bad weather. Dad’s had tears in it. They were open on both ends and underneath them rows of tables supported hundreds of pots out of which sprouted a multitude of green leaves. There was a field out back where big fuzzy cows walked around eating grass on the edge of the forest, and several pigs rolled in the mud against the nearest fence.

    To her right, away from the tunnels of plants, rows of tall grass grew with big brown stalks of fuzzy leaves on them, and all along the foot of the stems bright green leaves grew in rows like her brother’s little soldiers.

    Sitting between the lettuce rows, squat and round, was a man, bigger than her brother’s toys but much smaller than she was. His bulbous face wore a nose was too big, shiny and red. He wore a giant orange hat with crimson highlights that flopped over and landed on the shoulder of his bright blue jacket.

    “What’s that?” She tugged on her father’s coat as she pointed backwards. “Dad. Daddy what’s that?”

    Her father glanced back over his shoulder while he waited behind another man already speaking with Mr. Mills. “That’s called wheat honey,” he answered absently.

    “No, that!”

    She tugged again and her father turned around to look where she pointed.

    “That’s lettuce, we eat that all the time.”

    “No! That!”

    “What?” His voice boomed louder than the conversation in front of him, and the conversation stopped dead. She knew she was in trouble. When adults stopped talking because of her being too loud she always got yelled at. “It’s just a garden gnome.” He bent down low to her height, and answered her quietly, but the conversion behind him did not resume.

    A man walked out of a small greenhouse near the path to greet Jamie instead, his eyes steadily on her.

    “Not just a garden gnome,” he said with a smile. “He is a Helping Gnome.”

She squinted up against the bright blue morning sky to see his face. He walked with deliberate steps, balancing carefully between each one, but he didn’t use a cane the way old people in town did. He looked old differently than the other old people she knew. Mrs. Torres was paper stretched over lumpy apples. Mr. Mahoney was a giant potato about to burst. Miss Cai was a speckled pear.

    Old Man Mills was stone.

    His big clunky brown shoes left little puffs of dust on the path with each heavy step. Deep furrows cut from his mouth to his ears and across his forehead like a second set of eyebrows. His giant easy smile lacked several teeth, and each time he created an ‘s’ sound, it became a drawn-out thing like a wheeze.

    “Look at how he sits there around the lettuce leaves,” Mills added. “He keeps them safe for me, so I don’t need to use yukky, rotten eggs to keep critters away.”

She crinkled her nose, and thought of the lettuce her parents made her eat with its bitter oily tang.

    “Go ahead, take a look, and have a piece of lettuce while we finish here.” He waved toward the patch. His fingers were each twice as thick as her father’s and looked like dirty carrots.

    She turned back to the gnome as her father apologized behind her, and she stepped forward. Once she squatted, her head was just a bit higher than his floppy hat. She reached little fingers down to grab a piece of the lettuce but her eyes didn’t leave the gnome. She plopped the leaf into her mouth. It tasted sweet, and burst like a waterfall into her mouth, completely unlike what she was given to eat at home.

    As she chewed, the gnome turned its head to look at her, winked, and straightened his hat to a point, which then promptly fell back down to his shoulder where it had been.

    Gasping, she looked back over her shoulder to tell her father, but he focused with interest on whatever was happening in front of him, and the three adults paid her no more attention. Normally it would have been a lucky thing, just after having earned a little bit of her father’s perpetually simmering annoyance, like soup always a little too hot.

    She turned back to the gnome, but it was gone. A small hint of movement in the nearby wheat remained.

    “Hey.”

    Jamie and stood up and stalked between the rows of the lettuce, not crushing any with her booted feet, as much because the little gnome defended them as because she didn’t want her father to yell at her.

    She disappeared into the thick of the tall grasses, which towered above her. The sounds of birds, wind and adults talking became muffled. The fuzzy parts of the grasses swayed in the breeze over her head and the dried leaves hung down, stuck to the stalks, limiting visibility to a dozen feet.

    “Hello?”

    Her voice didn’t echo, and the stalks all around gave her speech a muted tone.

    “Mii, mooff millito mili,” said a voice from her left.

    The gnome from the lettuce garden hid less than a quarter of his ample bulk behind a single stalk of grass. She looked at him, he looked at her, and then he looked down at himself, pointed, and his eyes went wide. He made a few more noises filled with vowels she didn’t understand and then he took off at a run.

    “Wait!”

    Her legs weren’t trained for running and each rushed step, her little toe felt like it was being pinched by her brother in one of his silly pranks. She tripped over a fallen stalk. When she looked up from the offending hazard, she’d almost lost sight of the gnome who stayed just ahead of her. Hurried steps brought her bursting out of the row of grasses further up the garden, away from the adults and closer to the long polytunnel arches. Just enough cross breeze to let plants strengthen in the cold, but enough to protect them from the worst of winter rains and even the touch of frost that nipped through.

    A flash of blue on green gave him away and she moved after his round body. He rolled along, shuffling his weight left to right, his feet never hitting the ground with force but making gentle tangents as he scurried. His relative girth waddled from side to side resting on his belt of brown cloth.

    She stopped when she entered the tunnel. Her parent’s small glass-roof shed smelled like mildew, dirt, growth, and wet but this passage smelled fresh and alive. Rows of flowers in containers bloomed along the length of the arch. Red and white stone pots with thick rims sat next to thin old world plastic pots which were adorned with zig zags of unnatural color, but they all sprouted purple flowers with yellow trim stared at her with pansy flower faces.

    She stopped searching for the scurrying little man and went instead to the flowers and bent down to sniff them. In the tallest pots they were her height, and she didn’t need to bend far to tickle her nose.

    Jamie giggle and behind her, a second giggle matched.

    She turned and saw flashes of movement in every direction. Swatches of blue scurried behind pots, and hints of pointed hats and golden flops of hair were pulled behind table legs by tiny hands. One of them did not hide. The round little man from the lettuce stood in plain sight in the middle of the soft wooden mulch path that ran down the center of the tunnel. He pointed to her feet.

    “Mome mumm?”

    She looked down at the yellow and orange of her rubber galoshes. She had worn them in the wet puddles of spring and fall for as long as she could remember. Once, they were so big, she stomped around in them with their tops above her knees. Now they were painfully tight.

    “My shoes?”

    “Me mam mil mit.”

    The little man took a half step forward while pointing at her feet again. Several other gnomes peaked around corners of tables or over the rims of pots from between flower stalks, muttering noises she did not understand.

    Adult noses were ugly and had small veins everywhere. His nose was red like warm glowing coals, and he flushed. He wore tight-fitting soft-textured blue coat, with mismatched buttons that were far too big for the outfit, like they came from some adult’s clothes. 

    He lightly touched her boot, and made a motion like he would tug it free with both hands, and then pointed to her.

    “Mibe mete.” 

    “You want my shoes?”

    He nodded his head.

    Jamie sat on the edge of the nearest pot, and watched him. He watched her back. Other gnomes moved close around her now and still others flitted all around the enclosed space. Outside, far away, adults were still haggling and talking. She tugged, nearly falling off the perch with the effort, and, with a pop, one of her boots came off, flopped from her hand, and sailed through the air toward the gnome’s head. He stepped calmly to the side, and the boot landed with a muddy thump beside him. He scooped it up, and hurried away in his rolling jog toward the distant part of the tunnel.

    “Hey, that’s my shoe.”

    Jamie stood, tripped, and stepped too hard on the path in her socked foot. The mulch, a mix of damp squishy and sharp pointy things dug uncomfortably into her soles, causing her to trip again. She landed on her palms and then the gnomes moved closer still.

    Boy-gnomes, like the one who had taken her boot, came closest, but there were girl-gnomes, too. They had round chubby cheeks as red as the men's noses, and long braids in every shade of the rainbow. The children were not much larger than the models she and her brother played with, and could have ridden in toy cars and planes. With her attention on them, she only barely felt the next strong tug on her leg, and her second boot popped off.

    “I need that!”

    Jamie placed weight slowly onto each foot, taking care not to step on the sharpest parts of the wooden chips. As she stepped forward the gnomes retreated back behind the pots and table legs, except one.

    She moved with the same gentle rolling walk, but wielded a cane. Everyone else wore blues and reds, but she wore clothing the color of a fuzzy peach. Reaching out, up over her head toward Jamie, she offered a hand of beautiful dark brown skin, the color of perfect autumn leaves when they still held hints of every color but before the winter turned them brittle.

    “Me miaa mic mez.”

    “I need my boots back.”

    The gnome nodded, reached her hand out again further and squeezed her fingers open and shut once.

    Jamie recognized the gesture from her mother, and took the old little gnome’s hand. The old woman pulled gently, further away from the adults, and deeper into the purple and yellow cacophony of color and warmth. The tunnel was warm but not unpleasant and smelled like trapped sunlight and flowers. The little legs of the gnome took a much slower pace than her parents and Jamie found it comfortable to keep up.

    At the far end of the tunnel were fields where the cows and pigs lived. A half dozen gnomes scratched the pigs behind their ears, and two stood on the back of the cows, shooing away the flies with small swatches of cloth, to keep the animals happy as they chewed. Several of the nearest gnomes stopped in their movement, and went as still as statues when they saw a human, but a gentle nod of the head from the leader set them back in motion. Each of them bowed briefly to her and resumed their duties.

    Hay was brought in little handfuls to the feeding troughs. Two gnomes rode a yard dog past her. One stood on its back and tugged gently on tuffs of fur behind the ears to steer while another playfully rubbed the pooch’s low back causing the dog’s tongue to lol from its mouth in happiness.  Some tugged weeds from the flower beds. They all danced through their chores.

    They sounded like tweeting birds, the hum of bees, nature, wind and life. Song came from each of them as they seemed to spontaneously compose a beautiful tune, to which they swayed as they worked, but they stopped every now and then to admire a particularly lovely leaf or vivid blade of grass.

    Jamie felt a gentle squeeze which drew her attention back to the old gnome. She smiled with a row of perfect shining white teeth. The deep creases by the sides of her eyes suggested a thousand years of smiles. Jamie smiled back.

    She felt a tap on her back and turned around. Standing behind her the gnome of lettuce patch held his hands clasped on top of his round belly. On the ground, her boots shone brightly polished, their cracks filled, like they were brand new from before the Fall. He opened his arms wide and a smile spread on his face, showing his teeth all the way back to his molars. He bowed dramatically, and then gestured at the boots.

    She let go the old woman’s hand, sat on the ground, and pulled on her waders. They slipped on with one hand, and when she wiggled her toes, the insides did not pinch anymore. She wiggled them again and looked to the gnome and then to their leader.

    “You fixed them?”

    “Helping gnome!” The little man said excitedly, in almost perfectly understandable English.

    She pointed to herself. “Jamie.”

    He gestured to himself with all of his fingers splayed wide on his chest.

    “Murrag Mizzle Mirn.”

    “Mr. Rag Fizzle Fern?”

    He cocked his head slightly to the side, like a confused dog, shrugged, and repeated back to her. “Murrag Mizzle Mirn.”

    Behind her, coming down the tunnel, her father called her with a forceful but not worried or particularly hurried call. Accompanied by Old Man Mills, the pair walked down the plastic arch tunnel toward them.

    She turned back to the gnomes and found Mr. Fizzle Fern a few feet away, standing still as a statue in the same position as before, but the woman with the wonderful smile, gentle touch, and cane had disappeared. Several other splotches of blues and pinks of garden gnomes remained dotted around the property, near the animals, on fence posts, and in every garden, as still as stone.

    She stood, wiggling her toes invisibly inside her boots as her father and Mr. Mills approached.

    “What are you doing sitting back here?” Her father asked.

    “I was talking to Mr. Rag Fizzel Fern,” she said pointing to the gnome nearby.

    “Was he nice?” said her father. He used the tone every child recognized as an adult distracted. He picked her up as he turned back to Mills. “You sure do have a lot of those little guys, don’t you?”

    “They really brighten up the place,” Mr. Mills said in a cracking old voice with a light wink to Jamie.

    “We’ll be back in a few days with the rest of the potatoes and pick up the remaining oil and lard?”

    Mills reached out a hand to her father, and he shifted Jamie to his shoulder as he took the granite hand and shook it, sealing their deal. “I don’t know how you do it,” he said as he carried Jamie back toward the front of the tunnel. “You sure do take amazing care of this place.”