I didn’t believe in fairies.  Saoirse made me do it.  It seemed an instinctive notion on her part.  Five-year-olds can’t not believe in fairies.  And as she wandered around home, farm and garden chattering with endless questions about them, she managed to chip away at the walls I’d constructed between reality and fantasy until finally, one morning I escaped the burdens of parenting for an hour of silence in the woods.  Along my amble, I was mulling over a request from her.  She had asked me for a fairy tea party for her midsummer birthday.  And I was considering who, exactly, would be the guests.

I could deliver cake.  I could deliver tea.  But how was I to deliver fairies?  I stopped paying attention to where I was and lost myself in the land of motherly mulling, where I pondered how to make something authentic and special for my daughter, without weaving lies or filling her with Disney detritus.  

Next thing I knew, I found myself standing in a copse on the edge of an abandoned graveyard, seriously pondering whether my child was right.  Do fairies really exist? And I heard a small voice in my head:

Ever since the Enlightenment, Man has struggled to believe anything he could not measure.

We can’t prove fairies exist.  Nor can we prove they don’t exist.  And Saoirse had faith that they did. 

So I read up a little more, and learned that tea made with elder flowers and lemon thyme could help to lift the veil between our world and the next when sipped on the full moon at midsummer, which happened to be her birthday.  

So, for her fairy tea party, we stayed up late, til darkness finally settled over our hilltop.  We drank the tea.  We feasted on cake, put an extra slice on a plate, then took it off into the woods with us, along with Bob’s guitar.  

We set the cake out in a glade of woodland grass as an offering, then settled in to sing to the fairies.  

That’s when the lights started to appear high up in the tops of the trees.  Was it fairies?  Well, whatever it was, it was magic.

For several years after that, each summer when the Elderberry bushes bloomed, we would gather the blossoms for tea, then find our way out into the woods for an evening with the fairies.

But children grow up.  Saoirse turns 19 this summer.  Ula is 15.  They have their jobs at the farm, they have friends and boyfriends.  They have sewing projects and art projects and music projects.  

I don’t ask them this summer if they’d like to gather the flowers with me.  Bob and I sit down with our morning coffee at Rossman Pond, and I watch the blossoms drop to make way for the coming berries.  I like thinking about how the birds will enjoy them.  

I wondered when this day would come…When they would be too busy for midsummer fairy parties, too jaded with the burdens of life to suspend their disbelief and seek magic in the treetops.

Because, truly, I am gobsmacked by the burdens their generation carries.  They’ve had so much taken away from them, and moving forward on the conventional trajectory of high school, college, job and its prescriptive fulfillment is more and more each day an illusory aspiration.  Our youth battle anxiety and depression, despondence over the polarization of the world and the decimation of our planet.  I think it takes a lot for a young person to get out of bed each morning and turn their face toward the future with bright eyes.

And yet, Saoirse and Ula do.  They care for the livestock, they help in the cafe, they nurture their hobbies and spend time with their friends.  On Friday, Saoirse comes back to the cafe after driving through the valley to make a meat delivery.  She has brought me fresh fruit to serve Saturday morning.  She erupts from her car and begins dancing with joy in the cafe parking lot.

“Can you believe we get to live here?” She exclaims.  “With these mountains, and this light?  Can you believe that you can drive through the valley, and you can find all this fruit, and it’s still warm from the sun?  It’s just….AMAZING!”

And she carries that sense of wonder and delight with her wherever she goes.  Still, Saoirse is fully aware of the struggles her generation faces.  Some days she comes home from visiting friends, eyes wet, and she pulls me away from my desk.  I make us mugs of tea and we sit out on the steps while she weeps for their sorrows.  “I just want to take every teenager and bring them back to the farm,” she confesses.  “I want to show them what life can be like.  I want them to know how it feels to be loved, to have someone believe in them.  I want to teach them how it’s okay to believe in something, that there’s still abundance.”

And that’s when I realize it. 

She still believes in magic.  

Growing up has shown my daughter that there are sorrows in this world.  But it has not stripped her of her belief in magic.  It has infused her with a passion to keep finding it in more than just the treetops.  She finds it in a summer’s day, in a basket of fruit, in the light on the mountains.  And she wants to help everyone around her to see it. 

I know how she feels.  

Since the first evening when we saw the lights in the treetops, I wanted everyone to see it, too.  Some people will, some won’t.  And no amount of Elderflower and lemon thyme tea is going to lift that veil for them.  But that doesn’t stop me from seeing it.  Even without the tea.  Even with shootings and floods and sickness and wildfires and war.  Sometimes, on a winter night, I’ll be wakened by a twinkling light in a treetop outside the window.  Or I’ll see them in late fall when I get up to write while it’s still dark.  Seeing magic like that doesn’t fix the problems.  But something about it fills my heart.  And with a full heart, knowing that magic is out there, it gets easier to face the next day, to try again to make a better world, and to keep finding joy in that sense of wonder. 

 

The Hearth of Sap Bush Hollow podcast happens with the support of my patrons on Patreon.  And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons ML Geiger & Mark Sisson.  Thank you, folks!  I couldn’t do it without you! 

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