Fairies

My writing group met again last night.  I brought a bag of goodies for writing inspiration in case any of us got stuck. I picked a little toy fairy, and this is where it took me...

The Juana Briones Park was the perfect spot for us to play fairies. The park did have a playground with swings, a structure for climbing, and I imagine there was a slide as well. The park was huge (at least to my child’s eyes), and outside of the playground, the rest was grass, dirt paths and a basketball court. We considered ourselves too old to play on the playground equipment, but definitely not too old to play fairies.

My favorite part of the entire park was The Valley. It was a dip in the grass that sloped down and then up again. It was steep enough to build up some decent speed when rolling down with our arms tucked into our bodies, or enough momentum to propel a biker back up the other slope—equally steep. Suspended over The Valley was a huge wooden truss bridge, excellent for climbing and jumping. This was our climbing structure. The bridge was low enough that we could jump from the uppermost point down to the grass, but high enough that it made the butterflies in my stomach flutter each time I did so. In the winter this low point in The Valley was often muddy, and I would land on the grass with a soupy splash.

Under the bridge there were all kinds of cubbies and nooks in which we would prepare meals and potions. The ingredients were leaves, sticks, mud, rocks, grass and flowers. We often worked on our own concoctions individually.

Each of us also had self-assigned fairy names, which we used to address each other. Melinda was Clover her cousin, Megan, when she joined us, was Ginkgo, and I was Lily of the Valley.

The inspiration for Clover’s name may have come from the clovers in the park we spent so many hours and days inspecting in search of the coveted four-leaf-clover. I’m convinced that, at one time, there must have been some sort of radioactive material dumped in that park because we found so many mutated clovers over the years. Every time I found a four-leaf-clover, it would be taken home and carefully pressed in waxed paper between the pages of my 20-years-out-of-date Webster’s dictionary. This was a special dictionary because I had meticulously colored the illustrations in this dictionary with colored pencils, starting with the A’s and I probably made it through the M’s before I lost interest. I don’t recall who spotted them, but we did once find a 5-leaf-clover, and later a 6-leaf-clover. Upon finding the 6-leaf-clover, we promptly took it home, sure that our names would be etched, in eternal glory, in the Guinness Book of World Records. We were quite disappointed to discover that the most rare four-leaf-clover at the time was an albino 23-leaf clover.

I do remember at least one ginkgo tree growing in the park—the likely namesake for Ginkgo. I’ve always been fascinated by ginkgo leaves. Vibrant green in the spring and summer—a perfect, tiny hand fan for a fairy. In the autumn, the leaves turn bright yellow and fall from the branches, though they do not become dry and crumbly. They appear to hold onto the elasticity of their “youth”.  Even today, I can’t walk by a ginkgo tree without thinking of our days in the park.

I think I chose my name because it sounded pretty and feminine—two traits I did not find in myself at the time. It was perfect for our make-believe world. I don’t think there were any Lilies of the Valley growing in the Juana Briones Park, and I’m sure I didn’t even know what one looked like. I imagine they called me Lily for short.

I think of this time as the peak of my childhood imagination. When I spread my arms and ran as fast as I could down the slope of The Valley, I could feel my feet gliding above the ground as distinctly as I felt the wind on my face. The food I prepared under the bridge looked as delicious as any of the food I ate at home (sorry, Mom). I swear that the potions we concocted were totally and completely effective in defeating our foes or curing any malady that I, or one of my fellow fairies had contracted on our adventures. The summer before I started high school, we were still playing fairies in the park. Part of me thinks “Eek! How immature was I?” Most of me though, rejoices in the reality that I had so much joy and imagination in my childhood (mixed in with the sorrow and pain) and that I was able to hold onto it for so long.