I was at the store the other day and I saw this little fairy sleeping in a walnut shell. Cheesy some might say, and truth be told it is not something I would probably normally purchase. BUT (isn't there always a but?), this had a sense of nostalgia attached to it and I'm always a sucker for nostalgia. When I was a little girl I firmly believed in fairies. There was no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I believed that if you made them welcome, they would come. So while I didn't build a baseball field, I would build fairy houses. This was less complicated than you might assume, I would simply sit on a patch of well grown in grass and start to trim it down to the ground by hand. In this way I would weed out rooms and hallways. I collected flower petals (violets were always preferred) to leave for them to make new dresses with. But most important was the nutshell. I likely pulled the idea from images of Thumbalina sleeping in a nut shell, but whatever the influences, this was very important. My mom always kept a bowl of mixed nuts and a nutcracker around the house, and there was nothing better for a fairy house than walnut halves for beds. I'd work on my house and lay out the flower petals, arrange the walnut beds, and leave a bit of cake or cookie crumbs and sometimes a shell of milk--everyone knows fairies love this. Invariably, the next day the flower petals would be gone, the crumbs disappeared, and the milk consumed and I would smile through the rest of the day knowing I had made the fairies welcome. Oh, some might scoff, the petals blew away in the wind, and a stray cat or dog gobbled up the food and milk. As a girl I would have sighed and shook my head and felt sorry for those poor people who didn't really know, didn't really believe. As an adult, of course, I know better, and I still sigh and shake my head and feel sorry for those poor people who really don't know.

I think it is a fine and wonderful thing to walk through life and see trees, for example, and enjoy the beauty that they hold just in being trees. I think it is also--interesting--(although possibly also a sign of mental illness) to walk through life and see trees always with faces of dryads and sprites peeking out. For me, the balance comes in walking the wall and enjoying both the reality and the possibility--and that, for those who have asked, is why my domain name is www.walkingthewall.com.