Photo by talkingplant
The last book of the Gifts for the Goddess quartet (Spring!) has been a long-time coming and will soon be available at our website. During the time it’s taken to finish what was started years ago, the girls have grown up, my marriage has ended, and the family unit has moved forward in a different form–definitely more matriarchal and Goddess-oriented. Personally, I think this book will be the best of them yet. I would have loved to have it out before Spring began but life intruded and things are what they are. Then again, sometimes a little fairy dust helps–or doesn’t.
In taking a final look at the book before readying it for the printer, I felt a little like that old Bob Seger song, “Against the WInd.” You know, the line that says,
Well those drifters days are past me now
Ive got so much more to think about
Deadlines and commitments
What to leave in, what to leave out
I found some notes as I was making a final pass through the book–ones I’d forgotten and didn’t really belong in the book so they were edited out. It made me laugh because the girls were only about 3 and 5 at the time, andI’d just written a mini-chapter on keeping your allergies at bay during the early spring.
Here’s what got cut from the book but made me smile:
I walked outside to check on the kids. (I do this when they’ve been quiet for a while.) I couldn’t find them at first, but a sneeze alerted me. They’re very allergic to the Springtime of the year. Grass, flowers, you name it. The worst being pine and oak pollen, which necessitates frequent trips to the doctor. So a sneeze didn’t surprise me.
They stood in the edge of the front yard with a large, red, plastic cup.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“We’re collecting fairy dust.”
They tipped the cup enough that I could see yellow power–probably 8 to 10 ounces worth.
The little one, the one with the extreme allergies and the expensive air filters in her bedroom, was about to toss the powder into the air so it would come down on her sister and herself like yellow fairy dust.
“Wait!” I yelled. “What IS that stuff?”
Then they showed me. They’d collected their fairy dust by shaking the pine tree blooms into their cup. Pollen. They were literally dancing in pollen.
NOTE: I have closed comments on this article due to the hundreds of comments received from underage readers who completely missed the point of this story. Though we DO believe that fairies are real, the story itself is a humorous anecdote about children and nature. We do not have captive fairies to mail to you, and if you’re under 12, your parents would probably be upset to find you on this site anyway. Oh, yes, and I’m well aware that the thing on the girl’s nose is a flower and not a fairy. I think that the flower ties in with the story rather well. Thanks. –LT