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One bright morning I looked up from the notes I had been accumulating from all the recent happenings, and there stood my wife, as in a vision.

“It’s as if you’re not even here,” she rebuked me.

I smiled. I noticed a dimple between her eyebrows—maybe you could call it a crease—and for the first time in I don’t know how long, it registered.

“I want you back,” she said, and the creases around her eyes deepened into crow’s-feet. She was, I inferred, commenting on the long hours of journal keeping I had logged since the heat wave had broken. “I’m beginning to wonder if you married me just so you could write your book.”

The jab hit its mark. As her comment warned, there was a way that reporting on the events—if I weren’t careful—might intrude upon those very events. Heisenberg’s assertion—that measurement can change the nature of the measured—was still in force.

But almost before I could lift a pen, events interceded.

On the last Sunday of August, as the Minimite church service let out, an older man I didn’t know too well approached me. He apparently knew me, however, and had been keeping tabs on my pumpkin patch, which was visible from the road. Now he said with a shake of the head, “Looks like your pumpkins are dying off pretty fast. At least they’ll be good for selling some small ornamental types. I don’t blame you ’tall. We grew a few for ourselves, sprayed every week, and couldn’t keep the blight off.”

What? The pumpkins weren’t supposed to ripen until around the first of October, the opening of the Halloween market! I rushed over to the field. Under the curling leaves, mature orange pumpkins were indeed visible. I inspected them more closely. For once the Minimite diagnosis was incorrect. The leaves were dying off, yes. But the pumpkins were jack-o’-lantern size. Perhaps the rains of July and August had hastened their growth. I was transfixed by the many exotic shapes—long and wienerlike, short and squat, round and fat, some a little twisty and gourd-shaped, others pointy, and one a twin pumpkin—two merged into one. Most were a rich orange, but many were still half green and some were checkered. The average size was somewhat smaller than the seed company had said to expect, but this I attributed to the fact that I had not thinned them out as well as I could have. What we lost in size, we made up for in quantity.

But how would they keep?

We at least had to get them out of the sun. The next day the Miller boys helped us fill up two wagonloads, but that was all the time they could spare. The sun was sinking, but we knew it would rise again in a few hours, and we were on our own. We still had half a field to pick! As we fretted about what to do, a big, orange, opalescent disk slipped over the horizon, like an answer. It was as if someone had overheard our discussion, tripped a switch, and turned on the auxiliary lighting system. The harvest moon had risen.

We were unaccustomed to working after sunset, but we took the hint, returned with the Escort, and began to fill the hatchback. The moon soon rose higher and became more luminous. We were amazed at its strength. We returned again and again to the field collecting pumpkins in its soft radiance, awed by the romanticism of the escapade. But beauty was married to function, and the blue of the light, the soft night breeze, the myriad eerie silhouettes, and the suspense of the final outcome in no way detracted from our efficiency.

It was here in the pumpkin patch, I suspect, when we least were thinking about it, that Mary and I at last consummated our marital pledge of mutual surrender. No, more than this. We entered into a fullness of being with roots reaching deep into the earth, into culture—a clasping unity elevated far above anything we had yet known, a state of ecstasy from which there could be no looking back. It was as if the field were there to harvest us, not we it, the whole undertaking a pretext, a cosmic matchmaker’s ruse. At the stroke of midnight we shed our mortal shells and became prince and princess