Bringing Autumn In

“ But I'm going NOW!” Luke insisted for the fortieth time.

Several of the children and babies were playing at the treehouse. Most of the babies were waiting to do a train down the slide. The moment they could, they did. Unfortunately, the train crashed in a heap at the bottom of the slide, and Susie ended up at the bottom of it.

“Ow!” She squealed. “My leg!”

It was official, Susie had a broken leg and needed to stay inside. She wanted to participate in all the fall activities, but Ben Sweetpea was not quite sure when she could go out again.

About a week passed, and, and she was very fed up with it. We all paid frequent visits, but she was still very sad, and we were too, because we could not help her.

On the way back from one of these visits, Sarah and I ended up talking about what we could do for her. It was tricky because she wanted to be outdoors, but she was not allowed to be. In the end, we decided to “bring the outdoors in.”

We each called up several critters and asked them what their favorite thing to do in fall was.

“Harvesting my garden!” Jenny Border said dreamily.

“Jumping in the leaves with Sabrina,” said Shane Sandy

“Making sweets,” Ava Cuddle said happily.

“And I love eating them,” added Aidan.

“So how do we bring these inside?” I asked Sarah.

“The ones about sweets are already inside, though I don't know how to bring a leaf pile inside.

“I'm sure we could do something that involves growing. It might not even be too hard.”

“Whatever we do with that idea, Susie will like it.

The next day there was a secret meeting at the treehouse. Dominic had a bag full of leaves (against everyone's better judgement.) Sarah had brought a few pots for planting. Ava had sweets, with she was not even letting her brother look at. Aidan had another bag of sweets, which he was eating. I had a few seeds and a bag of soil.

All of the critters present knew what we were doing, and within minutes we got to work. Jenny and Sarah worked on a small indoor garden. I sewed a shawl, and so on. This continued for about a half hour. After we had gathered up our things, excluding the leaf pile, which Dominic had fortunately decided to abandon, we set off for the Silk Cats' house.

Susie was very glad to see us, but she was even more glad to see all that we had done. We opened up the window to let an autumn breeze in, and gave her the shawl for it became a little cold. Ava brought in enough fresh baked sweets for a tea party. Jenny and Sarah brought a little garden, planted with several herbs and one carrot seed.

“What did they do?” asked Samuel.

“They just brought fall in,” responded Suise. “Thank you.”

About a month later, Suise came over to the treehouse.

“Are you better?” I asked.

“I wouldn't be without you,” she replied.