Do you Believe in Fairies?

Tinker Bell was fast losing her light.  She had drunk the poison intended for Peter Pan. In desperation, Peter turned to the the audience and asked, “Do you believe in fairies?  If you do,” he pleaded, “then please clap your hands and Tinker Bell will live.” And, of course, we all did  and Tink didn’t die.

But do we really believe in fairies when we aren’t caught up in the Neverland of Peter Pan? What if we did, what if we who are so rational and logical, worldly and too often world-weary, put aside all of our practical, provable assumptions?  What if, for an hour or two or for a day we let all that go?  What do you think we might learn?  Would we discover something improbable, even magical?

Years ago, I had occasion to experience something like that.  And all it took was for a child to lead me there.

My granddaughters loved to build fairy houses when they were little girls. Fairy houses are, as you would expect, very small. They are made from sticks, moss, grass and dirt, perhaps a mushroom or a shiny stone, pinecones and flowers and leaves. We built them in the woods, on the beach, or beside a stream; under a riverbank overhang, in the space between tree roots, behind a sand dune or on top of a rock. There is only one rule. None of the materials can be alive. Flower petals that have dropped to the ground, mushrooms fallen over, twigs and berries on the ground but not still on a bush; these are permitted building materials.

When my granddaughter Olivia was five or six, she and I spent an afternoon on the wooded hillside in front of her house. We constructed quite an elaborate fairy house next to a tree trunk. It had several rooms, a table with two chairs, soft moss beds, a garden path and even an acorn cap pond. Practically a fairy mansion. When it seemed to me that it was finished I suggested that it was time to go in and wash up for supper.

“But where are the fairies?” Olivia asked.

Uh-oh. Grandmother hadn’t considered that question. My memory is that I stumbled through a fairly plausible explanation that fairies were very shy and that they would probably come find the house and move in when we had left.

“Will they sleep here overnight?”  I allowed that they probably would.

“Great,” replied Olivia, “so then we can get up really early and be very quiet so they won’t hear us and we’ll come up here to wait. Then when they wake up we’ll see them fly away.”

I certainly wasn’t ready for that! Luckily, she was too excited by the idea not to notice that I didn’t answer as we walked down the hill. She was eager to tell her parents about the plan.

The next morning Olivia came into my room around six. “Let’s go, Grummy, the fairies might fly away soon!” Okay, so she hadn’t forgotten.

Still in our pajamas we hurried downstairs. Her dad was in the kitchen getting ready for work. As Olivia ran out the door, he whispered to me, “I hope you have a plan.”  “And I hope one will come to me!,” I  sighed.

Up the hill, stealthy and silent, we approached the fairy house from behind “so they won’t see us” she said. Very quietly, we sat down on the rise above the little house and waited (my mind racing, praying for something, anything).

Then… “Look!” Olivia whispered, pointing.

The sun had just peeked over the trees and was beaming down near the entrance to the fairy house. Hundreds of tiny white dust motes, caught in a stream of light, floated out from within and all around the house and up through the trees.

The fairies were waking up and flying away!

Do you believe in fairies? I do.