Melody's Musings

A few weeks ago, we found a fairy village.

We were on one of our usual walks - a familiar route, the kind where you stop seeing what's in front of you because you've seen it all before. My son stopped. I don't know what caught his eye, a bit of color or a shape that didn't belong. He knelt down, and there it was: a small village tucked onto a tree stump. Tiny houses with tiny windows. Someone had made it, carefully, and placed it there without announcement. A gift for anyone who happened to look.

He looked at it the way he looks at everything new - with his whole body, like the world had just gotten bigger. A doorway to the fairy world, he said. And then he started looking for more, and of course there were more. Fairy houses in other trees, along the path, hidden in plain sight. We'd walked past them a dozen times.

I've been thinking about that walk ever since. About how often the world offers us these small, strange gifts, and how often I walk right past them. Not for any particular reason- just being in a hurry, or taking the scenery for granted, or assuming I already know what's there. My son doesn't assume that. He stopped because something was there, and it was worth stopping for. The stopping came first. The noticing followed.

Today we took a different walk, along a different creek, and the creek kept offering.

First the sycamore. At the base, the trunk was hollow. A dark, open space just big enough to imagine slipping through. I pointed it out to my son, and he looked at it the way he'd looked at the fairy village. A doorway, he said again. To the fairy world.

I've been thinking about that tree all day.

Sycamores have a way of becoming hollow with age. Their bark peels back in patches, revealing pale, ghostly layers beneath: white, beige, green — which is how the American sycamore earned its nickname, "the ghost of the forest." It stands in the landscape like a spectral, watching presence. And a ghost, of course, is a kind of threshold. Something that belongs to more than one world. I didn't know any of that when we stood there. I just knew it felt like something.

This tree was a long way from the creek I grew up playing in at my Nana and Papa's house.

That yard was a world unto itself. Every woods I read about growing up, every forest in every book, looked like Papa's woods in my mind- that's just what a forest was to me. The creek ran clear and cold, fed the pond, and came out the other side. Behind it, the woods went on for acres, with wide trails cleared through them that connected to a whole network of paths through the neighboring yards and woods. There was a clearing under a hawthorn where my aunt Jeanie had cleared the brush and made me a fairy hideout next to the creek. I don't know if she knew she was building the place I would measure every other place against. She probably just thought she was making a kid happy.

Papa loved nature- it was one of the traits he passed onto every member of the family. He'd lay next to the pond in the hammock my aunts had saved up and bought him for his birthday one year, and he'd be content there for hours. He'd wait things out. He'd let a conversation take the long way around. When I think about what he passed on to this family, it isn't a thing he said. It's a way of being in the world that was so consistent it became the foundation and baseline for measuring everything.

He and my Nana gifted my dad a sycamore tree for his birthday in August. Papa passed last month. I had no idea my dad's favorite tree was the sycamore- I didn't even know what one looked like. I had to look it up when we got home, standing in my kitchen with my phone, feeling a little foolish. So all this time, I'd been walking past my dad's favorite tree on the trail without knowing it, and today I was the one who noticed it.

The tree Papa helped choose is still growing. It will keep growing long after all of us are gone. There's a comfort in that I can't quite explain.

Here's what I keep coming back to. A few weeks ago, my son taught me how to see a fairy village. Today, I was the one who saw the tree. Something shifted in the interval- not a dramatic shift, nothing I could point to and say there, that's when it happened. Just the slow accumulation of stopping. Of noticing. Of letting the world offer things instead of walking past them.

I've been thinking about thresholds a lot lately. The fairy village was one. The hollow sycamore was another. And maybe grief is one too- a thin place where the distance between here and there grows strange and permeable. A quiet, enduring witness that bridges the ordinary and the mysterious. I think the ghost of the forest might have been onto something.

Wonder and grief keep arriving together. I don't think that's a coincidence. Both ask us to stop. Both ask us to look at something we'd rather walk past. Wonder asks us to look at what's still arriving. Grief asks us to look at what's gone. Same muscle. Same willingness to be undone by something you can't control.

I wonder what thresholds are waiting on your familiar routes : the small, strange places that ask you to pause.