The Fairy Door

Someone gave me a bag of slightly yellowed lace.  Supposedly, soaking old lace in OxyClean would make it come white again, which I tried.  Some pieces of it came white, but some did not.  I rinsed it and laid it over a deck chair to dry in the sun.  The breeze along Puget Sound was making lacy white caps of its own, showing off.  The lace dried in the breeze, but shorter lengths of it got blown across the deck and dirtied again.  I had to go chasing after it before it fell into the vegetable beds.  I guess I found it all.  Perhaps that is when I should have looked in the apple trees.

On our property we’ve got two knarly apple trees.  Years ago in a flight of whimsy, I put a greenman face in each. 

One is a kingly sort, with leaves curling around his jolly face.  He’s in the smaller of the trees, up front and low enough so any child can spot him right off.  The enchantress is in the bigger of the trees, up high and off to one side so it takes a bit of looking to find her.  Upon spotting her, the realization hits that she has been looking at you for some time.

Summer is wonderful time for taking a turn around the garden at twilight, enjoying the roses, seeing if the blueberries are ripe yet, wondering why we’ve had so many tiny green apples blow out of the bigger apple tree.  Moss so covers the limbs that ferns have grown along the branches.  The trees are pretty old.  The biggest has a gigantic canopy of cool shade. 

As you may know from previous posts, one must garden for children’s imaginations ‘round here, including big rocks to sit on for tea parties, stumps to transport the wisher to a different world, and dry streambeds in which to find crystally magic rocks.  So when Daughter With The Twins suggested the apples trees would be just the place for a fairy door or a fairy window, it didn’t take long for them to appear.

I found the fairy window and door so impossibly enchanting, that I called the little girls from next door to come over.  Little did I know what was to become of it. 

“Look,” I called, “see what happened in our tree!”

I showed them the window first. 

“How did you get fairies to come?” they asked.

“I put the greenmen faces on the trees, and then they knew that this yard was friendly to fairies.”

The girls decided to ask their parents to put up such faces in their trees, but then they got worried that their own trees were not knarly enough. Do you have to have mossy trees, they wondered.  I confessed I did not know the rules of fairyland.

When I took them down to the bigger apple tree, they spotted the fairy door immediately.  They peered in the window. 

“See those lace curtains?” I asked.  “I had some lace drying on the deck up there, and some of it blew away.  I see the fairies found it and used it as curtains.”

The girls peered in and there was no denying that there was my lace inside a little glass window, neatly sewn into curtains. They gaped in amazement.

How do these things come tumbling out of my mouth? 

“Not only that,” I went on, “but they took a lot of it.  I bet they've got a bedroom up here (tap, tap on the trunk).  They probably used some for a bedspread.  I wouldn’t be surprised if next week they build a tower up there.”  I pointed at one of the higher branches.

The older girls studied the tree.  “Look!  Doesn’t that look like a bridge?”

It sure did.  It was a branch left over from pruning that somehow got caught in one of the branches.

The littlest girl gently knocked on the door. 

“The door is locked,” said the older one.  “See the keyhole?” 

“Do you think they are home?” asked the little one.  They both took a turn peering in the window.  She cocked her ear and listened.  Just then, a little green apple fell out of the tree and their eyes got wide.

The girls nodded.  “How many children do they have?” they asked. 

“Five.  A boy, then three girls, then a baby boy at the end.”

“What are their names?”

Whew.  Stretching myself here.  Our German relatives with three little girls under age nine are flying over to visit next month, so it would be nice to have some Germanic names.  German is a hard language to name fairies in, in spite of the Teutonic penchant for worshiping trees.  Leaf is blatt, star is stern.  We couldn’t have fairies named Blatt and Stern.  I decided to have some English and some German.

“The father is Flitter.  He makes pumpkins turn orange.  The mother is Wispa and paints with frost.  The eldest son is Glitzern, and as you know is learning how to make apples green. I suspect he is not doing very well at it, look at how many he has knocked down.”

The girls looked at the ground.  Perhaps twenty-five little apples lay around their feet.  They nodded.

“Then they have three girls, Sonnig, Luna, and Starlit.  Sonnig is going to school to learn how to color blueberries.  If you’ve looked at my blueberries lately, she keeps getting too much purple and misses some spots that are still green.  Luna wants to paint roses, but is not old enough, and Starlit is so young she doesn’t know yet what she wants to do.  The baby is a boy named Donner, but they call him Dondi.  He’s very sweet and tiny.  They feed him milk from dandelions.”

The girls wanted the fairies to come out, but I told them that the fairies might be sitting up in the tree branches right this minute watching them.  To my great glee, dragonfly buzzed by.  The girls heard its wings but did not see it.

“Let’s go home and write them a letter,” said the girls.

An hour later they were back, with a tiny little note saying: “Dear fairies, WELCOME.  We want you to stay. –Madeline.”  They brought over some tiny doll clothes and left them on the fairies’ porch.  They put some very fine glitter on their note, which came off on the porch and lends an air of authenticity, in my opinion.

Well of course, the fairies had to leave a thank you note, so birch bark was obtained, and using a calligraphy pen, the mother fairy Wispa wrote back to thank the girls for the clothes and note.  She said that the clothes fit Luna perfectly.

Later that day, my doorbell rang again.  The girls found the birch bark note, rolled up like a scroll and tied with pink and purple embroidery floss (I must lock my sewing room).  Squeals and jumping up and down ensued.

Madeline got down and peered in the window.  “They used glue to put their window in,” she said.

“Well, I suppose they had to stick it in somehow,” I replied.

“I bet they used slug mucus for glue,” said Madeline.

I laughed.  “Probably.  Look at these tiny little nails they used to make their porch.”  I quietly knew that those naughty fairies have been in Hubby’s shop using the nail gun.  

"I've been thinking about Starlit, the littlest girl who doesn't know what she wants to do yet.  I think she should put dewdrops on spiderwebs."

Who knew that right next door lived a future novelist?

Towards dinner, my doorbell rang.  The girls wanted to show me the note they left in a tree in their yard, inviting the fairies to make a house there.  They put out building materials by their pond, including leaves and day lilies, and a lot of doll clothing.

Later, after the girls got back from swim lessons: ding-dong.  Hubby answered as I was watching TV.  The girls came dancing in to show me the gifts the fairies had left them, and the building material was GONE.  Their gifts were a tiny key that fit their keyhole, a metal bug, an acorn charm, a piece of rabbit fur tied up with blue beads and a red ribbon, and finally some of the lace “they probably had left over from making the curtains and bedspread.”

The girls wanted to go back out to the apple tree one last time.  It was twilight, and they knocked on the little door.  Huckleberry the dog sat with us as we chatted around the door discussing what fairies might like and how little girls could entice them to come live next door.

If you ask me, I think two little blond fairies already live next door.