My daughter is six-and-a-half years old. She knows that living things need rain in order to grow. Yet, she also wants to go swimming and roller skating, and she is willing to take things into her own hands. She believes that she can make a potion to stop the thunderstorm in its tracks.
She has the help of the fairies in her garden — a raised bed in the backyard that she has filled with flowers and feathers, sticks and stones, mulch and dirt. As per the fairies’s instructions, her stop-the-rain potions are mixtures of these garden elements in a plastic cup.
The fairies would like to use the crystal in the pie safe, but my daughter grudgingly obeys her mother’s prohibition. With the rain pouring upon her, my daughter squats in the backyard, tearing a flower petal to pieces or pulling a few clovers from the lawn, sprinkling sand and dandelion fluff, and twirling her concoction with a finger or plastic spoon as the rain stubbornly continues to fall. Her potions never sacrifice living creatures, although butterfly wings, dead cicadas, and dried worms are fair game for ingredients.
Who knows? She may create a come-back-to-life potion. The world is mysterious and magical. Just ask the fairies, o ye of little faith.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of “Little Big Moments,” a collection of mini-essays about parenting, and “Tigers, Mice & Strawberries: Poems.” Both titles are available most anywhere books are sold online. Taylor-Troutman lives in Chapel Hill where he serves as pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church and occasionally stumbles upon the wondrous while in search of his next cup of coffee.
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