The first time I ran away wth the fairies, truth be told, it wasn’t as much as running away to them,but them coming to me in the way that they do, the curious, the gentle, the entreating, or in their mischief the leading away. Sometimes they approached the way wild animals became accustomed to strangers and adopt them into their pods, like Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. I didn’t know those names back then, but it was the same, a stranger amid the wild. I listened for their bell tone voices, their songs in the windchimes. I thought that I heard their echoes among the birds melodies. I watched for their dancing among the autumn leaves, and looked for their trails in the snow next to the thin chickadee’s scratchy prints.
They were real to me, the fairies more real to me than the people in school bus, or my brother and sister. They had names like Hoggle, Ludo, Toadwort, and Gray-Owl. (some names I borrowed from films, or books I had read, but the fairies never seemed to mind.) I lived in my own world, where the fairies visited, so I followed the. In the deep woods, I’d lie on the soft moss, stretched out under the canopy of peach scented ferns. The black and white birch trees bent in the breezes, while the oaks and maple treesclacked in the winds. It was fairies, ghosts, boogeymen, and pixies that kept me company. I left acorns, and maple seed helicopters for them, dandelion blossoms in spirals and twists for hopscotch squares.
When I was a little older Iit was away to Neverland where I competed for Peter’s affection against the angelic Wendy and jealous Tinkerbelle. I fought against Captain Hook, knocked the poison away from Peter’s mouth, and soared above the mermaids. To the outside eyes of my parents, I was running around the huge yard and the woods with my arms outstretched, climbing trees. I climbed on ancient rock walls, and lept off to the ground. They didn’t see the lagoon that I flew above or hear the songs from Tiger-Lily’s camp. They worried that I was lonely, that I lived too much in my own head. But they were loners too, happiest in nature, and in a book. I was the youngest of three, and maybe they had enough problems with my older siblings. Maybe they were just tired. Maybe they just didn’t want to disrupt me when I was happy. Whatever the reason, they left me alone, and I lived in ungle of my imagination, with the fairies.
I dragged my friend with me into Fairyland, into my imagination. She was civiliized with blonde hair, in pigtails and ribbons, blue and white Buster Brown saddle shoes that you took off once you entered the house. I, on the other hand, was feral with leaves and branches in my hair, and rocks and feathers in my pockets. My shoes were dusty, and muddy; even my stocking-feet left dusty footprints upon her mother’s shining hardwood floors in the enormous Victorian. I didn’t understand the rules of town life. Why couldn’t we run around, and climb the trees, why we couldn’t yell for excitement on the Fourth of July when we held sparklers? Why we didn’t chase the fairies down the hills behind the house. The house had a nursery, and a dog (not called Nana and not a Newfoundland) a small dachshund called Girl who ran up and down the stairs like lightning and whose coat was like silk, but was completely unsuited to rowdy adventures. So we my frind and I stayed inside, and we played indoor games. We drew. We sang songs, and made quilts. We ate fresh fruit, and chewed sour apple chewing gum until her mother told us, that we had had it long enough (five minutes to begin with). We were calm. We were tamed.
But then, the inevitable happened. I started to grow up. The fairies became more hidden. I still found them, as the motes in the hot spot lights, and the puffs of dust that shifted from the heavy rust orange curtains that framed the deep wooden stage at theater rehearsals. How I wanted the power to close the curtain and separate the real world of the audience and live strictly within the confines of the plays, the safety of the stage, the swelling of the orchestra; I knew all of my cues, all of my lines, the songs to sing, and the dances to leap through. It was safe, protected. The imagination and the combined power of the company on stage made it powerful, otherworldly. It was magical, and safe, and the fairies, though different, were still there.
I could feel them when the audience fiiltered to their seats, before the overture had begun. I crept out the stage and lay flat against it, the warmth of the wooden boards radiating through my body. I would peer out under the closed curtain, and spy on the people about to join our journey. The gentle vibrations in the stage, the humming in the lights reminded me of the fairies, the anticipation of adventures. And when I stood near the stage door and listened for the first laugh of the audience - James Barrie said that a fairy is born when a baby has its first laugh - another magic was born.
The first law of Neverland, what Peter Pan himself commanded is that we must never grow up. Only Pirates are grown ups. But that is the unkeepable law, to never grow up. As we grow up, we stray from the fairies. We lose sight of them. We catch glimpses of them, maybe as glimmers of light that catches our attention from the corner of our eyes. In the dark, we might hear their songs mingled with windchimes, and coyote howlings, or the early spring frog songs.
We are at arms’ distance, or farther the older we get.
Until.
Unless.
Unless we fight to create.
Unless we fight to stay, somehow, tethered to them.
Unless, or until, children are put into our paths and we are lucky enough to look at the world on their levels, and we are taken by the hands led back into the fairy games, their arms outstretched and flying again over the lagoon, and the pirate ship. Until we re-open the books and see the worlds clearly again, and we are away with the fairies once more.
And there perhaps the fairies recognize us, our clothes too big, our noses grown into weird adult shapes, but something of our previous, childlike selves remain, and they come to us again, creeping, tip toeing , watching from afar to see if we remember the old songs, the dances, and the rhymes from the ferns and moss days.
© 2025 Rebecca Lane