There be fairies?

While checking out the Contrariwise blog yesterday I read about Urban Fairies and how you just never know when or where they might be about.



As I have been planning to post on my other blog The Ardent Thread about Warped and Wonderful, a weaver who sells her work on Etsy.com, I thought this might be just the thing for an urban fairy who likes to live in comfort: a handwoven bedspread, available through her shop right here.



When I was little (okay, stop laughing, I know I'm still short) my grandmother would take us grandkids on hikes through her neighborhood on the waterfront of Puget Sound outside of Olympia, Washington. We'd wander through dense forests of old growth trees and wild flowers, and she'd tell us to keep an eye out for the forest fairies.

One summer when my sister and I asked to go on a fairy hike, our grandmother told us we couldn't go anymore. Why not? Because a developer had bought the surrounding acreage and was building houses on it. The fairies were gone. Forever. Believe it or not, that one moment stuck in my mind as the point at which I became and environmentalist. I was probably only 7 years old at the time, maybe even younger, but it opened my eyes to the idea of urban sprawl and over-development. As an adult, I've collected flower seeds from my grandmother's garden to grow in my own garden and always make sure there is a safe place for the garden fairies to live.

My grandmother, a formidable woman, passed away at the age of 94 in 1997, the year my son was born. I was living in England, tending to Old World fairies in my tiny (1 foot by 3 foot) garden and taking my babies for strolls across the nearby heath, past mounding shrubs of wild roses, eating wild blackberries or sipping nectar from honeysuckle. I was on the brink of a messy divorce, but what I remember most fondly are those long and lovely days spent out in the scrubby wilds of southern England with little children (sometimes several, including the neighbors) in tow.

These days my high desert fairy friends are under snow, perhaps dreaming of the flowers we'll be planting in the spring.