Childhood Magic

Remember the summer
You built fairy gardens
With your mother,
Planting shoots of grass that
Sprung up like a forest,
And placing small stones
To create a cobblestone path
Which led to a carefully constructed
Popsicle house?

Remember when you would
Sneak out the back door
While the dew still gleamed
On the lawn,
The sun a sleepy haze,
And you’d tiptoe
In shined church shoes
To the miniature garden,
Hoping to catch fairies mid-dance?

If you try very hard,
You can remember the little notes
You found tucked away
Within the Popsicle house,
Written a glittering ink
From a magical world,
Each curve of the prose
Curled in the same way
As your mother's handwriting
Found on post-it notes
In homemade lunch sacks.

...

 

As a child I was enamored with magic and fairies. My mother would spray "sleepy dust" (water with glitter) on our pillows before bed and leave notes from the tooth fairy under our pillows. However, there is a point where, like the children in Peter Pan, we all must grow up. Everyone, that is, except Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the famous author of Sherlock Holmes. In 1917, Elsie Wright (age 16) and Frances Griffiths (age 9) took several photographs in which they appeared with fairies. These photographs became known as the Cottingley Fairies, and eventually began to attract the world's attention.

The first photograph taken by Elsie Wright in 1917.

Doyle, who was long interested in spiritualism (the philosophy that there are other worlds besides the one we can see and touch), was excited by these photographs, supposing them to be evidence of the existence of supernatural beings. He then went on to publish the photographs in an article in The Strand Magazine, advocating for their authenticity. This magazine is, ironically, the same one in which he published stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, a character famous for using perception and logic in order to solve crimes and disprove superstitions. 

Doyle eventually published a book centered on Elsie and Frances' photographs titled The Coming of the Fairies, a manuscript of which can be found here. In it he concludes:

These little folk who appear to be our neighbours, with only some small difference of vibration to separate us, will become familiar. The thought of them, even when unseen, will add a charm to every brook and valley and give romantic interest to every country walk. The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life. Having discovered this, the world will not find it so difficult to accept that spiritual message supported by physical facts which has already been so convincingly put before it. All this I see, but there may be much more.

Elsie and Frances eventually confessed that the fairies were a hoax in the 1970's, explaining that the fairies were nothing more than illustrations they had cut out of a popular children's book that had been posed for the photo. Doyle, however, believed in the authenticity of the photos until his death in 1930. 

And that story, my friends, leads us to this wonderful meme: