Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town and all of its characters and settings belong to Natsume. Also, this story was written in response to a request to write a story in response to an ancient Chinese poem, the poem I picked being The Bloom is Not a Bloom by Bai Juyi which you can read at http/ if you wish. I'm aware that in the actual game the Harvest Goddess won't show up if you stay up until midnight, but the poem made me think of nothing so much as that relationship.
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She came to him at midnight, bringing with her the scents of ripe fruits and turned earth. He woke, as he always did, to her brushing her fingers over him carefully, gently, as if no matter how long they'd been together she never quite became used to human contact, as if she was still afraid she might do something wrong.
He was always tired because of her, because he still needed to work the farm all day and only had a few hours to sleep after all his tasks were done before she arrived. But it was worth it, for the few hours he got to be in her company, and if he'd wanted an easier life... well, he wouldn't have been the sort of man the Goddess would marry to begin with. He couldn't even imagine what life would have been life if he'd settled for one of the girls in town, for shy, creative, Mary, or sweet, motherly, Elli, because how could he ever have chosen to be with anyone other than her? He had known, within just a few weeks of meeting her, that he would never want anyone but her, and had worked hard for years to finally win her hand.
The only thing he would change, if he could, was how rarely he saw her. From midnight to dawn she would stay with him, then she'd look in, for a moment, at their son who'd never have a chance to really know his mother, and finally vanish again as suddenly as she'd appeared, back to her lake and her duties as the Goddess of the Harvests.
He should never have expected things to be any different. Why would he even have imagine that a Goddess would be content to stay in his home and live like a farmer's wife?