Mine was a plain childhood-hours spent outside, usually up in trees, or at their roots, constructing miniature worlds. Wonder runs deeper than gaps in our knowledge. Learning, several years later, that the accessory was made by a human dampened my faith in the wee folk no more than the facts of childbirth shook my belief that babies come from heaven, trailing clouds of glory.
I am blessed with parents who encouraged my imagination, and even my own neighbor who, on discovering a “Gnome Home” that I had constructed under the hedge, knit a tiny mitten from pearl cotton and left it there for me to find. I was quite sure that I had seen a fairy once and, besides that sighting, I had a whole store of evidence for the existence of the little people. In “The Child Next Door,” one of the poems that I read and reread when I was young, a girl describes her neighbor, a little sophisticate who, despite having a wreath on her hat and a bouffant afternoon frock, is only to be pitied: “But doesn’t it seem very sad to you, / to think that she never her whole life through / Has seen a fairy?”
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