Where’s the Whimsy?

When I was little, I remember running barefoot through my yard, picking through the grass carefully to find the wild onions and picking up the wild strawberries, gathering them for the fairies or for the “harsh winter” I was about to face. I would sometimes lug the cardboard boxes out to the bottom of my driveway into the cul-de-sac and create a castle where I could reign benevolently over my subjects. 

When I was eight, I had a Ladybug Club, where I rescued ladybugs and picked them up and cradled them in my grubby fingers. I remember believing I was probably an animal fairy– until the ladybugs started biting me and I discovered that ladybugs do in fact pee on humans. 

When I was ten, my sisters and I created our own forts in the backyard, taken from the sticks piled in the backyard. I created the biggest shelter of them all and fortified it with leaves and small sticks to keep out the autumn wind. I dug out small bowls in the makeshift kitchen and covered it with a rock so I could store things that needed cooling. I would bring The Boxcar Children out to read with me, or my latest Nancy Drew, or whatever fairytale book I was reading. 

And I would lay down, grass allergies and all, and read until I was called in. Sometimes my sisters and I would forgo water or using the bathroom to stay out longer. 

When dusk fell the glen in my neighbor’s backyard would come alight with fireflies, or the last specks of light would filter through the trees. I was certain for years that if fairies did in fact exist, that they lived there. I convinced myself they were real for years on the only hunch being that nothing that beautiful could simply exist without the existence of some sort of magic. 

My best friends were not fairy tale lovers, and they certainly were not supportive of my fanciful imagination. I would hide the fact that my brain was working twenty five times more than theirs, that I was quiet not because I had nothing to say but because my mind was working too fast to keep up with. Sometimes during car rides I would be completely silent as I thought of a new story idea or a new invention that would help the world. I am convinced that if my hands were as smart as my random ideas, I would be a rich inventor by now. Instead I forget most of my inventions and with it the stories that went alongside it. 

Last year I was writing a letter to my best friend and told her I will never be as intelligent as my twelve year old self. I truly believe that. My twelve year old self was playing outside, singing to the birds, still mostly unafraid of the bugs, reading in her magical yard. I do not think that I could possibly invent anything as magical as my twelve year old self. Sure, her spelling was still questionable, and her story ideas weren’t always perfect, but she tried. Why am I so distant from that girl I used to know? 

Why am I distant? I ask the question often but I already know the unfortunate answer. I am on my phone too often and I am ignorant of the world too often and I am too tired and too practical now. I want to believe in magic but sometimes it’s hard. There are adult problems now. Rent and cars and loneliness. 

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to work at an all outdoor camp. The little girls pulled me aside and we looked for bugs in the nooks of the trees and beside the creekbed. Their eyes fell on four stumps beside the playground and instead of playing on the playground with the rest of the children they began gathering acorn caps and bits of wood. 

“What are you doing?” I asked. 

“Building a fairy house, want to join?” 

Of course I wanted to join. “What do you want me to do?” 

“Get some acorn caps,” the leader told me. “We need bowls for fairy food.” 

I retreated and found acorn caps– lots of them. As I passed back to the stumps I saw bits of blue on the ground. I’d been at the camp a week and a half and hadn’t even noticed before. 

“Hey,” I said as I came back, “I found fairy blueberries. Do you want some?” They were the small berries that used to fall from a tree I had in my yard as a child. I thought they were the most darling things as a young girl. Fairies definitely ate them. 

The leader jumped up and down and I showed her how to pick them gently up from the forest floor. We spent time harvesting and then collecting bits of pine and fresh leaves for a fairy salad. By the end of the day, we had created a fairy house, a fairy kitchen, and a fairy dining room with five beautiful dishes. 

The next morning, the girls rushed to the clearing to find that two of the bowls were emptied– pine berry and sawdust special was gone. I wondered secretly if birds ate pine berries, or ants, but I couldn’t imagine anyone eating the sawdust. The bowls were perfectly intact and the girls were talking excitedly to one another and to me. I couldn’t hold back my smile. 

“Do you believe in fairies?” The leader asked me. 

“Yes,” I said, without thinking. I panicked and wondered if I’d be condemned. Then I remembered the clearing by my house, the smell of wild onions on my hands, the lightning bugs lighting the sky on summer nights. “Yes,” I repeated, more sure. 

The leader smiled, satisfied with my answer. She took my hand gently and leaned up to look at me more closely. “Me too.” 

One of the older girls decided to help and gave a bit of cake from her lunchbox for the fairies, as well as some homemade applesauce from the apples she’d had in her lunchbox. By late afternoon six girls were working diligently with three other girls coming down to help whenever they felt like it. The boys came over and started yelling about how cool the fairy town was starting to look. One of the boys even returned to their “camp” and brought us a gift of bark. 

After he did, the boys started chanting on their own, “Fairies are real! Fairies are real! Fairies are real!” I placed a small plastic flower in the dining room and let them discover the gift from the fairies. All the reminders of my best friends mocking me for my silly dreams were suddenly erased in the act of kindness. 

I felt like I was living in a dream. These are the sort of moments that feel like a movie: ten kids chanting words while standing on stumps in a clearing, yelling to the world that fairies are real. I watched as beautiful chaos unfolded and the plastic flower flew from hand to hand and back again, breathing in awe at the magical present they’d been left with. 

The girls– and boys– informed me that the bugs surrounding the fairy enclosure are gifts from the fairies. Fairy pets, that they trust us with. 

“Look, look!” The leader dragged me to the house. “Look,” she whispered. 

I looked. A lightning bug, right next to the wild onions she’d just picked. 

The next day an entire small box of plastic flowers and a note appeared at the fairy garden and the kids could not contain their excitement.

“Do you really believe in fairies?” The leader asked me, to make sure. 

“I think fairies come in all shapes and sizes,” I answered honestly. 

“Did you write the note?” Another girl asked. 

“No.” 

“Really?” 

“I did help the fairies. They can’t spell well.” I explained how they spelled the word ‘the’ and demonstrated by showing her a scribble on a piece of paper. 

“So you’re a friend of the fairies?” The leader asked.

“Yes.” 

“What do they look like?” 

“You have to find that for yourself,” I said. 

“How do you become a fairy friend?” 

I shrugged. “You just have to keep being their friend, I guess. And you have to believe.” 

The leader came to me thirty minutes after the conversation and informed me that the others were starting to doubt. “They told me fairies aren’t real.” 

“Hey,” I said, crouching to her level. “Not everyone will believe. That’s okay. You believe. And one day, you can be like me. You can help other kids believe.” 

One day, she will lose some of her whimsy. It’s impossible to keep all of it in this technology-based world. But she will one day be around young girls who guide her to a forest clearing and they will make her peel the wild onions and gather the tiny pine blueberries and she will remember it all and she will tell them that the fairies come out at night and dance by the light of fireflies. She will remember that they leave gifts, and maybe the kids she’s with will find gifts, too. She will tell them the truth. She is a friend of the fairies, and she will say, “you don’t have to believe. But fairies aren’t always what you think they are.” 

Because I think fairies are real, in a strange sort of way. Fairies, to me, are the magic of childhood, the sacred smell of the earth, the feel of someone’s warm hand in yours, the kindness and innocence of childhood, the pure belief we all have before the world steals it away. 

And in my opinion, this world could use more fairies. So I think I’ll get off of my phone, and head into nature to find the magic again. 

Written by,  Adelaide Laurence