They live on cherries, they run wild

We have a huge old tree on our property, maybe hundreds of years old, and it bears the living scar from where a branch was removed decades ago. This scar forms a friendly whorl, full of moss and little shelves and my children decided several years ago that this was a secret fairy house, obviously, and much of their outdoor play is spent building furniture - flower chairs and petal blankets, little twig beds and polished stones for plates - for the fairies.

My Baby has a pragmatic soul. Where her older sister has always been like a flame or a ghost, a child of wind-hewn wildness, dark and brightness, The Baby is easily read and likes tea in pretty cups and sensible stories about turtles who need to learn to go to bed on time and told me this very morning "Mama, if you want a cozy kitchen, CLOSE THE FRONT DOOR." And yesterday she rummaged through The Fairy's Tree and finally said to me, despairingly, that she hadn't found ANY fairies at all.

When The Girl was six, she had this tremendously beautiful dress which looked odd and off-coloured on the hanger and then transformed into this beautiful shifting thing when she wore it, exactly the perfect thing for my fey, airy child:


I tucked the dress away and found it again yesterday when I was unpacking some hand-me-downs, shimmering oddly, and held it up for The Baby, who declared that it was ugly. She needs her own dress, the colour of sturdy trees that grow up, their roots firmly gripping the earth, the colour of her eyes that see so clearly, even when the truth is disappointing, her hands full of moss and not magic.