On Fall 30 in Mineral Town, the Pumpkin Festival was a holiday that was very friendly to all the children. Of course, for Annie, it was also a lively, noisy, and wonderfully novel day.
Because that day, she could go from house to house begging for food just like the other children?
(*?′?`?)
Yes, begging for food. That was pretty much what it meant...
Anyway, that day she got to be just like a normal Mineral Town child (even though there were only three children in the whole town...), openly kick in door after door, and eat all sorts of freshly made snacks—some delicious, some awful. In the blink of an eye, fall was over, and Mineral Town had entered the final season of its 120-day year: winter, which lasted thirty days.
For Annie, winter in this world arrived just as abruptly as the other seasons. The day before, it had still been a crisp, sunny fall day, but as soon as the clock passed midnight, heavy snow began falling outside, and the north wind started howling fiercely. By the time she got up the next morning, all she could see was a cold, white world blanketed in thick snow.
Then all the crops in the fields on her farm that hadn't yet been harvested—including the pasture grass—were covered by snow...
The semi-automatic hot spring irrigation system she had designed and invented, with Uncle Gotz handling the construction, had frozen into a solid lump of ice. Every bamboo pipe that had once dripped water was now hung with rows of sparkling icicles. They looked like crystalline willow branches, reflecting rainbow colors in the sunlight. They were so beautiful that the townsfolk, with nothing to do in winter, marveled at them and flocked to see them. They had practically become one