The Fairy House

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The air was floral scented by the magnolia and lilac that leaned over a white picket fence like persistently curious neighbors.  Near where a cedar-shake playhouse sits, tucked in the corner of the lot, birthing bunnies from beneath its floorboards.  The elm in front of it was grumbling a creaking annoyance shifting its weight left and right upon what appeared as two stubby legs formed by a hollowed-out crotch at its base.  Its limbs were tangled and banging in a surging wind that couldn’t decide to blow north or south but seemed instead rather content with thrashing the treetops from all directions.  Above the sun-bright pale green of its budding branches, a vapid gray was being weaved into cotton bolls.  Fluffy plumes that drifted in the fickle blow across an inverted blue sea where returning waterfowl performed pirouettes, spiraling from out of the heavens and down into the city’s lakes and wetland marshes. 

Birds had returned and taken to whistling songs while the pond peepers contributed with their chirping.  They were welcoming an early spring and my contribution was that I’d just finished raking and shoveling the soggy-leaf remnants of winter into yard bags.  The woman I love lives here.  And when she comes out to see all the progress I’ve made around her home, she turns to smiling and pays me with grateful kisses and hugs.  But it’s when we see her daughter, slowly circumnavigating the backyard with her head down and arms crossed behind her back, that the cold seemed to creep back just a bit.  And in that moment as in many others, I saw it in this mother’s eyes that although this winter will soon be forgotten, underneath it is a winter two years removed that’s yet to leave and is impervious to my efforts.

Later, I’d watch this daughter from a short distance, careful in holding my tongue, this little hill of a girl becoming a mountain with all the molten emotion and urgency building under her skin.  Her mother assures her— the next store will have what she’s feeling defeated over— the figurines for her fairy house.  She’d been planning it in the folds of her blankets in the lonely silence at night beneath the window that looked out over the playhouse below.  In the morning, when the sun would reach in through the window above her brother’s bed across the little room they slept in, she’d take what plans she’d stowed away inside her through the night and haul herself down stairs.  It was at the kitchen table where with colored pencils and a sketch book we’d get the first glimpse of what she’d been imagining.  But then she’d depart, set herself exploring out in the yard searching for what nature might have in the offering, comporting to her designs.  She’d already built a picnic table of twigs and bark and hot glue.  But what she needed now were people.  Not just any people.  Cheerful and welcoming and cast as such in joyous anticipation so as never to change— the moment when heads were about to turn and glasses were about to be lifted in toasting an arrival for the return of a very special guest.

I knew this girl’s father.  He was a friend of mine from years ago now, in the early days of our careers as tie-wearing civil engineers.  The kind of engineers that could look at a rough patch of land and envision it as strip-malls and office parks and then proudly fuss over every detail related to parking stalls and storm-water catchment.  We also fussed over streetscapes designing residential neighborhoods.  We drew countless plans and profiles of endlessly curvy roadways with detailed landscaped boulevards of Kentucky Bluegrass sod interspersed with ornamental trees, 2-1/2” minimum diameter.  We each detailed an untold number of road sections with curb-cuts for driveway aprons, trails and sidewalks.  We re-defined the contour of the land, shaping it as we saw fit for whatever we imagined.  We drew and re-drew lot lines and then re-drew them again and again, searching for a kind of Golden Ratio in all the neighborhood’s 2D geometry that yielded the most buildable units for— people.  

For all the fitting the neighborhood to the land we performed, most all of the houses were not so much fit to the neighborhood.  They were largely cookie-cutter affairs with front facades of deceiving elegance hiding the uninspired big box of sticks behind it.  But they were homes nonetheless, eventually filled with people.  Every morning, those people spilled out from them into a world that most times was accommodating and friendly.  Routine.  Familiar.  And at night, those people would come back and following some mild coaxing between the dinner table and a tuck-in for bed, re-tell of what the day had held for them in hiding.  And the re-telling would be met with looks of astonishment or wonder.  Sometimes laughter.  Sometimes concern.  But the next day, seeing or being participant to a roaming bike gang of children meant everything was right or at least on a designed path heading towards rightness.

Becoming an engineer was a logical path for me because for as long as I can remember, I’ve been designing things, particularly homes.  And I always envisioned them in tree-lined neighborhoods or remote places of quietude.  Ideating and creating is often a means to cut pathways of possibilities through stubborn realities.  But why with homes?  Where does this come from in me?  When I stop and look closer, I wonder if the need is rooted in my own childhood.  The early times when nothing in my life or my teen-mother’s life was settled. Those days were turbulent and as thrashed as the treetops had ever received.  We were temporal nomads and everything was in a constant state of impermanence.  The two of us blowing in and out of houses and lives attempting at every turn to create a shelter to fall back on for what the the world would spring on us tomorrow.  It all makes sense from that context I suppose. 

There’s something of similarity here that I know existed in my friend’s early years. But his experiences aren’t a story for me to tell.  What I can share is that we once took a trip to look at a neighborhood I’d designed that he imagined his people— his wife and unborn children, turning it into a home.  It was a development built around a horse farm as an amenity for their future residents.  It had large grassy meadows and paddocks including a complex of wetlands for all the acrobatic waterfowl to call home for the summers.  He’d been considering a particular future lot on the western perimeter, asking me how it might be designed to accommodate a walkout-basement given the difference of grades between the front of the lot and the rear.  He deliberated out loud about which rooms of this imagined house should receive the morning sun versus the evening sun. He permitted me access to his dreaming about these future kids fishing and catching turtles and riding horses along the neighborhood’s many wood-chip trails.  Then he’d be drawn inwards, in where I couldn’t follow, becoming reticent.  The eyes looked out over a landscape shaped for homes but even then I could sense they were being used as a foil.  He was moving through something from another place or time. Something invisible to my eyes which can be everlasting and imperishable to his.

I’ve come to know that his wife has gold-glinting brown eyes that in the right light seem as radiant as the iris of a wolf.  And like a mother wolf, she possessed incredible endurance and strength and a preternatural capacity for protecting her pack.  Her den did not end up being the home that he’d been imagining that day with me, but rather a quaint cape-styled home in the heart of the city.  It also needed no facade like the homes her husband and I were used to working with.  Front to back it was brick and mortar painted simply white as if to say it was enough to be authentic if not just built strong.  Inside, there was little room for the non-essential with spaces seemingly purpose fitted for what eventually became the four of them.  It was sufficient for movement, but intended proximity.  Closeness. The house itself a living extension of their pack and a manifestation of resilience against enemies seen and unseen.  And so it was that when her husband started coming home from the world out beyond that troubled his sense of worth deeply, there was no secret he could keep about it.  The walls of the house and the arms of the family closed on him in a loving embrace.  The pulse, the breathing, the feeling of presence of them all seemed at that time one living organism.  Returning to it one day after a workout, she knew within seconds in what the house had to say that something was wrong.  She searched the rooms and called his name, asked the children “where’s your father?” and when no answers came, the protectant wolf rose up within her and she leapt out of her den and into the cold winter morning to find him.  Her animal-like sense got her close to him, the place where he’d eventually be found.  But the rest of that day is her story to tell for not even my imagination can evoke the kind of agony she encountered there or the unseeable grief she’d have to bring home and live with behind her eyes.

Sometime after that, I’d check in on the three of them with a seasonal cadence.  And in time that period would shorten to the cycles of a full moon.  But when I began to make more regular visits to their home, I began to feel inside me, a sense of having arrived in the kind of place that I myself had been trying to erect over the debris of the past.  I was finally letting go of bits and pieces that I’d been carrying from the places I’d called home that had collapsed and subsequently was swept away like straw.  With her now in my arms at night, holding her hands, folding her palms into mine, I’d look into her kaleidoscope brown eyes seeing joy toppling sorrow with each turn of the wrist.  She reflected hope and happiness in what we were becoming.  It was this, and it was now.  No more reaching back and pulling forward, imagining something different and having to will it into existence out of a lonely square of space.

But lying there in the soft rolling landscape that was the linens upon her body and bed, I could still feel something of that winter’s cold.  Like maybe all of this was really me playing house in a home that could never be mine.  In those moments, the playhouse outside her bedroom window would call for me.  Her husband, my friend, had built it and I began to feel an obligation to him to not let the color leach out from it any further.  Because it was more than just a playhouse.  It was a model for sanctuary.  The place you go when you need to escape or you’re feeling lost.  A meeting place for a kind of chautauqua for when the world seemed too complicated and painful and love would come find you, talk it all out— ready you for re-emergence back out into the world.  Stronger.  He built this for his children from a perspective that I related to and I decided I could not let that winter hold it any longer.  So with their son, I went about sealing what cedar tannins it had remaining in the woodgrain.  It was a sunny Sunday and I remember it because I was determined to bring that light in, back inside it.

Behind us, the daughter had taken to investigating the distressing calls still emanating from the elm tree.  She wrapped her arms around the trunk with a bear hug trying to provide comfort and stared upwards into the branches looking for what more she could do.  Her eyes followed a swing’s ropes high up into the canopy and back down again to where the wooden seat swayed with a gentle invitation.  Like the playhouse and the adjoining sand box, its presence in the backyard was the doings of her father in needing to erect things in the world for his family in opposition to what he’d experienced over the arch of his life.  He went so far as to search the city over, finding that seat-board that in itself had been infused with its own family story.  She sat herself in that seat, watched us a while and then turned her attention back to the tree and found in that hollowed base the perfect location for her fairy house.

She began in earnest.  She unboxed her collection of figures, special rocks, moss and pinecones and then turned to salvaging furniture from an old dollhouse relegated to storage in the living room corner.  She studied her drawings then knelt down in the grass and began composing elements she liked from them.  She constructed a meandering walk of limestone chips taken from a neighbor’s garden edging.  Adjacent to it, little raised garden beds of cypress wood-chips from her mother’s garden beds.  The picnic table was placed in a sunny stretch and acorn cups set for bowls.  Then a cardboard box was fished from a recycle bin to serve as the underlying structure.  A curl of birch bark was added for the swept roof line, popsicle sticks for a pair of window frames and a round-top door added, all crafted to playfully mimic the playhouse.

She returned to it daily, adding fresh flower pedals and sugar treats and disappointedly found the figures faces becoming stale in the waiting.  It continued that way for some time and despair started to set in.  Emotions would well and her mother, absorbing it all, would encourage her without promise that it’ll work.  You have to be patient in your waiting to be able to experience or see things that aren’t ready to reveal themselves.

One morning, something was different.  The girl approached her fairy house and noted there were large footprints in the dew-softened grass.  Her heart quickened and she moved to investigate.  There on the figurines were faces as bright as a glorious sunrise!  Laughter! Cheers!  Smiles and joyful tears!  Suddenly there was someone behind her— she could feel it! It was him!  He was there!  She felt his presence!  She covered her eyes, nervous and scared and happy all at the same time that she’d summoned him home at last!  Her body trembled.  She began to cry and waited for his voice— for his touch!  But it never happened.  Instead what she felt was a slightly warm light breeze that tickled the hairs on her skin.  She wiped her eyes, turned and searched.  He was gone.  But he did pass through.  It was brief but it was enough of a reveal to place a seed of hope in the form of a smile on her cherub cheeks.

At least that’s the story I’ve made up here— the part about crafting and tending to the fairy house.  The visit.  It’s all make-believe because I never saw any of it.  Shortly after restoring the color back into the playhouse, the tumultuous wind-thrashing between seasons got up between mother wolf and I.  It was slow in the realizing but the winter from before wasn’t quite ready to release its hold, no matter what I did.  She retreated into her brick den with her pups and the wind promptly whisked me away from the door, like straw. 

I’ve since returned to the world of imagining things different.  Now I’m out doing my own circumnavigating of sorts, riding an adventure motorcycle across vast stretches of lonely landscapes, searching for a sacred place to dream another home.  Searching eyes again but for what this time I might call determination.  I want to rely less on designing and making things for what doesn’t appear.  I yearn for another as determined as I to just work with what we have as broken or discarded as it might be.  All while searching my messages for indications mother wolf and her pups might themselves return again.

Then it was me that the world sprung a surprise on one morning while walking my dog through the woods. It was Mother’s Day and the thinking of mother wolf bit me and shook me and wouldn’t let go.  Suddenly, there below in a hollowed-out hole in the base of the trunk of a tree I swear was a little fairy house!  It hit me again how cruel the world can be sometimes but also how full of wonder and magic it can be when you least expect it.  In fact— I swear this too— I once saw fairies!  As a teenager with a girlfriend.  They were there, hiding in the woodland on an island in the backwaters of the Mississippi!  Six of them if I remember— Floating between the tree tops as pulsating glowing orbs the size of bowling balls!  And with that memory, I turned to scanning the woodland where I stood believing as this girl might, that magic just might happen today!

It’s said that if a fairy were to appear to you, you could ask three questions.  Could this fairy take the form of someone I knew?  Perhaps any one of the four of them?  I wondered.  Imagined.  Hoped.  Because if it were true, and I could be facing my old friend again, I’d ask of him what I imagine his children asking, and what I used to ask of his wife with just my eyes so as not to overtly pick at a scab:

“Would you let me see your mind, behind your eyes so that I know where you hurt?”

“Will you lend me the key that unlocks your peace and happiness?”

“I’ve been trying to make this all beautiful because I want you to stay in my life.  Will you return and stay this time?”