“Do you really think it is?” she asked in an awed whisper.
“Maybe.”
“Where is the wardrobe?”
“You can’t see it from here,” I told her. “It’s to the left of the lamppost.”
Eyes wide, curls dusted with snow, she started into the empty space.
“Do you think we can find it?”
“The wardrobe?”
A firm nod.
“One day,” I said.
She nodded again as I took her hand.
“One day,” she agreed. “I am going to find it.”
I glanced right, at the faun peeking around the tree.
“You will,” I said. “I know it.”
PHOTO PROMPT © Liz Young
“It’s a tree!” His friends stood back, looking at lines and angles, but seeing only a huge tree.
He said nothing, captured by the spirit before him, breathing age.
“Hey, you want to go get some snacks?” Jason asked.
Always hungry, that one, but for the wrong things.
He stepped forward, drawn by the inexplicable radiance before him.
“Let’s go. I’m starved.”
“It’s a tree. Big whoop.”
He stepped inside the doorway into darkness. Dizziness. A rush of lightening across his spine.
A rustle of people starting up the path. A pause.
“Hey, where’s Dave?”
“Dave?”
“Humanity does not suffer from the disease of wrong beliefs but humanity suffers from the contagious nature of the lack of belief. If you have no magic with you it is not because magic does not exist but it is because you do not believe in it. Even if the sun shines brightly upon your skin every day, if you do not believe in the sunlight, the sunlight for you does not exist.”
― C. JoyBell C.
Linus: [writing] Dear Great Pumpkin, I am looking forward to your arrival on Halloween night. I hope you will bring me lots of presents.
Linus: Each year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere. He’s gotta pick this one. He’s got to. I don’t see how a pumpkin patch can be more sincere than this one. You can look around and there’s not a sign of hypocrisy. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.
It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is my favorite Halloween book of all times. Having kids meant we got all sorts of Halloween books – Pumpkin books, ghost books, witches book, monster books. All cute and funny, but not the Great Pumpkin. If you have never read the book or seen the TV show, you needs to attend to that loss right now.
You wouldn’t want to miss the Great Pumpkin now, would you?
Linus is my favorite Charlie Brown character. Most times, he is a wise man in a child’s body. Other times, as with the Great Pumpkin, he is a little boy clinging to his belief even in the face of his friends laughter and teasing. That, after all, is what faith is, right? The inner knowledge which allows one to believe in something magical or religious even in the face of laughter and/or guns. Or both.
I know the Great Pumpkin isn’t real. We all know that. I think even Linus knows that truth but he still keeps the faith each year, sitting in the Pumpkin Patch waiting – believing – this time the Great Pumpkin will come.
I like the thought that somewhere a little boy is waiting in a dark pumpkin patch every Halloween, waiting for this miracle to rise up before him and reward his faith. How many of us could do that year after year when the miracle never arrives?
If, by chance, in your holiday travels, you come across a small boy with a blanket sitting in a pumpkin patch on Halloween, say hello for me. Tell him, if he keeps the faith, – if we all keep the faith – something magical just might happen.
And who’s to say there isn’t a Great Pumpkin after all?
Today I choose life.
-Kevyn Aucoin
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
-Mahatma Gandhi
What you plant now, you will harvest later.
-Og Mandino
“In every crowd are certain persons who seem just like the rest, yet they bear amazing messages.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight
A Writer's Life 
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