Fairytales

Romance.  I picture fairies in soft green woods, flitting over gurgling streams, tickling the feathers on the long ears of the Great Horned Owl, turning frost into buds, spreading pixie dust on the spiral staircases in old castle towers.  Why, just mention the word 'tower' and my imagination spins away from me.

I have long given up my childhood fantasies of fairies under the leaves, gentle animal friends, and talking toys.  But it was with great reluctance that I gave them up.  (Is it too late to tell Tinkerbell that I believe?)  I can still remember the funny tales my sister and I wove when we were younger.  We had a whole load of fascinating friends crammed in the trunk of the car on our trips to grandma's, or else they road in an invisible trailer.  I used to imagine having some sort of friend that ran along on the side of the highway, keeping up with the car with ease.  The other day, prompted by a fiction I was reading, the highway brought to mind those childhood dreamings, and I could almost see him, jumping from tree to tree, running and sliding on the guard rail, scaling rocks with ease.  I can't remember what he was, or who he was, but he rarely fell behind.

Even now, as a teenager, I still sometimes imagine things while I'm in the car.  Car rides can be so dull, after all, and I have a squirming imagination.  (Besides, I sometimes have a slight inclination to motion sickness.)  I once spent all my time on car rides composing a story that was inspired by an illustration I once saw of a nun and three children looking at a book together.  The eldest girl became the daughter of a strict nobleman with the power of a medieval baron and she was in love with a boy that he didn't approve of.  The other two were her younger siblings.  It amazes me how meticulously I put that story together.  It lasted me a long time, and I can still remember the drama of it with acute detail in some places - although I've forgotten why her father finally gave in.  Perhaps he died?  When I finished the story - all in my head, mind you, I wrote none of it down - I was at a loss as to what to do with myself on the car rides.

Now, I sometimes imagine that I'm a princess or just a vulnerable girl with information - or some such nonsense - being chased.  I'm in a carriage, wearing a hooded cloak - dark green maybe - and my coachman is loyal to me in some way.  I'm on a dirt road in an old-growth forest with big, health pines.  But that's mostly all.  Sometimes I'm a girl on a journey, and there are other passengers in the carriage, and we say very little, but I sit by the window with my hands in my lap, staring resolutely and self-consciously out the window.  And I must confess that this all happens even to this day on occasion.  I never go into long tales as I used to, but it is fun to sit in a car going maybe as much as 80 miles an hour and pretend for the moment that you're in a racing carriage, trying to outrun someone.  If you close your eyes and think, you can almost hear the clop-clop and the crunching gravel - albeit you're on a dirt road.  And actually, you're on pavement.

Recently, I began reading a book by C.S. Lewis.  I was assigned it for school, and I am absolutely captivated by it.  I loved every minute of it, even though the plot wasn't on-the-edge-of-your-seat dramatic.  Awed by Lewis' magical, fictional world (or is it?), I remembered my old obsession with fairies.  I hadn't wanted to give up my belief that fairies were real.  After all, in many of the stories I'd read, the main character could see fairies because he/she believed in them, or people who couldn't see fairies were portrayed as "grown-up" or dumb.  But whenever I debated with myself about it, I had to admit that it probably wasn't healthy for me to go on insisting that they were real.  I looked everywhere, anxiously, for signs that things were as they were in fairytales.  I drove myself crazy waiting to be befriended by a simple fawn or a clever fox.  I jumped in on my stuffed animals, anxious to catch them in the act.  The evidence was as clear as could be.

Yet, that doesn't mean that we have to forget fairies.  It doesn't mean we can't imagine knights in shining armor, or dragons, or talking donkeys.  When the leaves rustle, the poets see pixies playing at their games.  And such poetry, or even such prose, exercises the mind in seeing what it can't see, being open to what it doesn't know.  I don't know that everything will have a fairytale ending, but if I didn't believe it could happen, why would I bother?

~Meggy