The Gentlest Soul

I met the boy with the gentlest soul in the Indian Himalayas.

Quiet voiced and mild mannered, his very being whispered poetry. Frail, bent and still, he was a tall Keats displaced in time.  It did not take more than a half step into the world of fancy to see his angled features, shadowy in flickering candle light, bent over a sheet of yellowed parchment.  He was an ethereal time traveler spirited away to rural India, looking at the world with the calmest eyes.  In another time, I would have fallen in love with him.

               
     In the here and now, he enlivened me.  Normally stifled by shyness and awkwardness, I fluttered around his stillness, talking breathlessly, continuously, carelessly.  He watched with even gaze, clarifying my half-thought out sentences and clipped words with careful questions.  I buzzed with a reckless energy and vivacity I had never before possessed, and he watched, with quiet intensity.

Sitting on a rock by an Indian stream, I talked.   I fixed my eyes on the boy, more a man than a boy, and I let the words come, curling my legs under my body.  He waded through the water, nodding at my words, an otherworldly half-smile gracing his lips.  As the sun slid down below the mountain peaks, the world was on fire and I burned with a desire to speak until I ran out of words. 

He listened. 

Maybe I was a little in love with him. 

And I wish him a happily ever after.

Once Upon a Time

“Before you met me I was a fairy princess

I caught frogs and called them prince and made myself a queen”

Faith Hill

         My mom tells stories. The story of the bullied boy locked in the cabinet, and the story of the package of bacon slipped into the grocery cart.  She favors the ever repeated and ever clichéd story of the walk to school along the railroad tracks, uphill, in the cold Manitoba winters. Her life puzzled together through tales of the bright, sparkling peaks and the dark, shadowy valleys.

         I want to tell stories too. 

         I am the daughter of an unconventional minister and an irreverent lawyer.  I grew up lakeside in Connecticut suburbia.  I have romantic sensibilities, mixed with a dollop of pragmatism.  Sometimes I do see myself as a fairy princess. And sometimes I find food in my hair.

         The online Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a fairy tale “as a story (as for children) involving fantastic forces and beings (as fairies, wizards, and goblins)” and as “a story in which improbably events lead to a happy ending” (Source).  My definition of fairy tale is an amalgamation of the two. For my purposes, a fairy tale is a moment in life, so improbable, surreal and full of “fantastic forces and beings”, crystallized into story form.  It may or may not have a happy ending but, even if it doesn’t, that’s where I’m headed.

         According to Wikipedia the definition of what is truly a fairy tale is disputed, and this is how I justify creating my own definition, for my own purposes.  What is not disputed, however, is that “fairy tales do not require fairies” (Source). The fairies truly are optional.

But I’ll do what I can.

You'll have to forgive my pictures. I'll have a camera soon.

"And before you knew me I'd traveled 'round the world

I slept in castles and fell in love because I was taught to dream"

Faith Hill