Fairy Tale

I think when we are children we all believe, to a certain extent, in impossible things.  We think unicorns or dragoons are real, we secretly know that monsters live in our basement, or brownies live beneath the floor boards.  When I was little I decided that I wanted a fairy for a pet.  Although the idea of a fairy sitting in a bird cage seems a little inhumane now, at the time this was my perfect vision of a pet fairy.  I believe it was brought on by watching Peter Pan.  Unfortunately I never found my fairy and I never went so far as to buy a birdcage for it so I wouldn't have known what to do with it if I had caught one.

Some of us are a little more fanciful in our imaginings.  One of my friends would go build small fairy dwellings in the forest for the fairies to live in.  She set up many different rules for herself, the houses had to be made only of natural material (rocks, twigs, grass, leaves), perhaps the most important rule was that once the houses were complete, she could never return to them.  For if a fairy moved into the house and then the human returned . . . it would ruin the illusion that fairies existed?  It would anger them and they would leave?  The magic of the place would be broken and the faeries would disappear?  No one knows why you could never return.

The story I would like to tell today does not involve magic, but a very great deal of imagination.  One of my friend's has six children, all of them girls.  Two of his younger daughters liked to build fairy furniture for a fairy they believed lived in their house.  They would set up clean little tissue paper beds and fancy chairs and cushions made out of cotton balls for the fairies.  A little while after the girls had made the furniture a note would appear next to it, thanking them for the beautiful chairs and beds.  An occasional note from a fairy was all the incentive they needed, they made furniture almost every day.



Unbeknown to the younger girls, the two oldest daughters, thinking it was a sweet idea and wanting to make their sisters happy, were the ones who had written the notes.  All the girls went along happily for several weeks, the younger ones building fairy beds and the older ones writing them grateful notes.

After a while the two older girls got busy with school and other activities and stopped writing the
younger girls notes.  The two little girls were very distressed, they went to their father, explaining the dilemma and their concern for the fairy.  Their father—being the very kind and considerate man he was—told them that he had seen her just the other day while he was cleaning the house and . . . he had accidentally vacuumed her up off the floor.

Thus was the rather sudden end of the beautiful house fairy that lived with them, she was never heard from again.