This piece is a follow up to one I wrote a month ago called I Believe Her. I’d encourage you to read that one first unless you are quite fond of reading things in an order that leaves you a little turned around, in which case, by all means, enjoy the twists and turns. I’m sure you’ll find your way. xo
The fairies have come. They arrived on a windswept incantation on the evening before her seventh birthday, to help with the dragon situation. They came because they were summoned, and because magic exists in many forms, and because a little earth-born child needed a way to communicate with her very distant and deeply missed mother.
Not me, not this mother. Not this mother with fingers and flesh and feet, scribbling this story onto your hearts. Her other mother, the one with claws and scales and wings, the one that sent her here through a now closed portal for some purpose unbeknownst to me.
What happened is this: the dragon child squatted in the dirt beneath the willow tree on the day before she turned seven and began to gather the dry, curly wooden branches that had blown off that beloved tree in a flurry of spring storms, along with bits of bark and grass and the large sloping leaves of the balsamroots on the nearby hill. Her little fingers balanced and wove and twisted those treasures into a lean-to dwelling against the trunk of the willow as the tree swept her arms in a leafy benediction above the girl’s bent head. When she was satisfied with the structure, she found a tiny pail and filled it with fresh soil and buried the stem of a dandelion seed head inside and created a tiny sign on the end of a twig that said, “Make a wish” and another that said, “Walcam! A free farey hawse! Plese leve a crestl! It wade mene a lot!”
She decided that the water bowl that we keep filled for thirsty deer and squirrels and stray cats would make an acceptable pool for the fairies, and she surrounded it with painted rocks, one of which was made into a bed of grass so that they might comfortably relax after their swim. She placed steppingstones leading up to the entrance of the house, and stuck twin pinecones on either side of the door, flanking it with those prickly guardians in the spirit of old manors protected by twin lions or towering gargoyles.
Later that night, this mother— the one with fingers and flesh and feet— realized as I read her the last story she would ever hear as a six-year-old that the fairies could, in fact, do even better than the requested crestl (crystal). In a quickened rush of emotion, I remembered that a few weeks prior I had received a rare and precious treasure in the mail, all the way from England, from a friend I met right here in the enchanted land of Substack, one Emily Charlotte Powell.
I knew that these wonderful little hand-crafted mushrooms would be a gift for my daughter’s birthday, but until then, I did not know how to present them to her.
After she fell asleep, I wrapped the trio of mushrooms in gold tissue paper, and tied up the package with twine, and I placed it in front of the farey hawse under the waxing moon, with a rolled-up letter. I had said my own little prayer to the night sprites as I sat down and crafted that message to the little girl, hoping with my whole heart that I had the blessings of the fairies and all other mystical beings who happened to be tuned into our little story, which is really the oldest story of all— the story of a magical child missing hearth and home, a hero on a quest to remember who she is.
The letter itself is a private affair between fairy and child, but for the sake of the story, I will tell you that it involved a tale of a fae-born human named Emily who crafted an enchanted mushroom containing a door that can only be created and opened by fairies, and only once a month when the moon is full. During the full moon, the portal between the dragon world and the human one is open just wide enough for a fairy to slip through. The note instructed the child to leave a letter for her dragon kin on such a lunar occasion, and the fairies would deliver it and return one in kind.
A tiny silver bell was included with the package, with further instruction to ring it seven times once the letter was laid next to the portal door, so that the fairies would be alerted to its presence.
The child had to wait a week to write her first letter to her dragon family. She read and reread the message from the fairies almost every day, sometimes out loud and sometimes folded over the page in the corner of the living room, her lips moving in whispered murmurs of delight.
When the day finally arrived, she placed her letter next to the largest mushroom on the windowsill in the soft glow of the full moon’s light, rang the tiny bell seven times, and awoke early the next morning to find not the letter she was hoping for, but a small postal receipt letting her know that the package had been picked up at 2:57 am and the return letter would be delivered the following night at the same time (this human mother needed a minute, and honestly, so did the fairies, as the Gamma Draconis planet is 154 light years from the sun, which is an awfully long way to fly. Also, one must get used to delays in mail if one is to survive this earthly realm.)
Undaunted, she held the receipt in her hand and looked up with wonder in her eyes, and said, “It’s real, mama! It’s all real!” She then proceeded to show me the distance from earth (the mushroom) to her planet (the doorknob of the mudroom) and estimated that at the moment, the fairies were likely somewhere about a third of the way there, at approximately the second cushion of the couch.
She slept beside me the next night, on Sunday, and on Monday morning she shot straight up in bed and asked if we could go look for her letter. It was 5:22 in the morning, but I rubbed my eyes and smiled at her and kissed her tangled crown of golden hair and nodded yes, a bit grateful that the next full moon wouldn’t be for another 29.53 days.
As promised, a response was waiting for her on the windowsill, written on the back of a sheet of paper printed with dragon scales. She sat on the floor and traced the words with her finger, and each one dropped from her mouth like a shimmering spell.
Again, this intimate exchange between a mother dragon and her hatchling is not for public consumption, but I will tell you that the dragon child feared that she was forgetting details about her mother— what she looked like and what her powers were— and the mother dragon reminded her baby that she was a shape-shifting dragon, capable of taking on any form at will. She could also send her spirit to the child’s planet and often inhabited the bodies of both humans and other animals for short periods of time so that she could check on her daughter.
The dragon child nodded solemnly at that, and just then a hummingbird flew right up to the window and looked inside, and the girl pointed and said, Look! It’s her! and I swear that fluttering creature paused and caught her eye for longer than a hummingbird usually hovers in place before taking again to the sky.
This mother wonders sometimes about belief in magic, about the way in which we foster wonder in our children. Is telling them about Santa while wrapping a present in his name a moral failing, a deception, something they will need to recover from at some future date? I truly don’t know. Will she someday ask me if I wrote these letters, and how will that make her feel, and what, exactly will I tell her?
Because I do believe her. I believe in her magic. Just last week, I was talking to my own mother about this, and she paused and said, Do you remember when she was born, how she came out? I laughed a little and admitted that, bleeding as I was, shaking and collapsed on the edge of the bed after 72 hours of grueling labor, I only remembered that I was relieved that she finally had come out, immediately followed by the terror of realizing that she was not breathing and that I could feel the life leaving my own body to the rhythm of my pumping heart.
My mom is a retired NICU and labor and delivery nurse. She was a very good one, at that, and with decades of experience delivering and treating mothers and babies, she was by far the most capable person in the room to care for our girl when she finally arrived earth-side those seven years ago, blue and breathless and much too still.
She didn’t act like babies usually do in that condition. She said. She was not floppy and splayed out. She was curled into a tight ball— her muscle tone was remarkable. She paused then, as my eyes welled up at the memory and her voice cracked a little. She looked just like she was inside an invisible egg. Like she wasn’t sure she wanted to be here yet. I hadn’t thought about that until now. How she looked like a dragon that hadn’t yet hatched.
Not until her grandmother taught her how to use her lungs, that is. Not until she urged her granddaughter to roar her first roar, coaxing her to life. Then the dragon baby spread her arms out wide (and her wings as well), and she opened her mouth and announced her arrival in this realm, and we all wept in relief.
I think that if she someday asks me why I wrote these letters, I will tell her that there was truth in the beating heart of that very first one. I will tell her that the body her dragon mother’s spirit visits most often is my own. That I could feel the heat of her in my fingers as I penned every word, just as I felt the heat of her in the blood pulsing out of my body on the day of her birth, just as I felt her heave a sigh of relief in my chest when our girl first roared, and we knew that she had safely passed from one home to another.
Maybe all belief needs is a willing portal on this earthly plane, and I opened myself up as an offering on the altar of that magic on the day I agreed to be her mother.
Maybe she will come to understand that two seemingly incompatible things can be true at once, even when it is hard to understand how this can be so, and that knowing this will open her up to all kinds of wonder in this maddening, enchanting world.
Maybe she will learn that presence and love really are the same thing, and that this was my way of helping her remember that she has always been infinitely deserving of both, in every form she has ever inhabited.
We all need to be reminded of that, in the end. Each and every one of us.
I am so here for this ongoing story. And the deep love and presence she brought to creating that fairy welcome feels so much like a practice of reverence.
Oh Kendall! How lucky your dragon child is to have you as a mother.
You are dealing with this in such a wise and beautiful way - but I can imagine how very difficult it must be to have your child tell you that she is longing for her dragon mother.
Your daughter is clearly a child of magic, aware of the presence of other worlds, and these extraordinarily beautiful mushrooms from fae-born and insanely talented @EmilyCharlottePowell, providing that precious access through the fairy door were such an absolutely perfect and truly lovely gift.
I don’t think that it was coincidence that the hummingbird paused outside your window in its hovering, nor that your daughter arrived into this world as though she were still tucked into her egg.
And I don’t think that anything done in the spirit of such love, could ever be viewed as a moral failing.