Fairies, Pippi Longstocking, and Tennessee Williams

What a day! I went to the French Quarter this morning for a Master Class on writing at the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival and as I was walking down Bourbon Street at 9am, I was so overwhelmed. There is something about the Quarter–it’s iconic for me. And it’s not just that I’m looking around and seeing the same buildings people saw 300 years ago; it teems with culture, and there’s an authenticity and beauty there that is incomparable. Walking into a non-descript doorway that opens up into a stunning courtyard, dripping with fecund flowers and palm trees and people already having their morning cocktails…
At first I was skeptical as I’m never a big fan of these types of classes, but the writer won me over by the end. She had a lot of valuable things to say and in the end, I was inspired.
Can’t ask for much more than that.
I came home to find a “fairy-finding kit” in my mailbox from our old babysitter, Roxana, who now works at a high-powered banking job in NYC. She’s always sending Annabelle and Henry fairy stuff. This kit had a little apothecary jar for capturing fairies, a tiny net the size of a thumb, a jar of pink pixie dust with a mariboo stopper, and a magnifying glass. I read to Annabelle out of the tiny book, advising us on how to catch fairies.
Annabelle spent a lot of time showing me exactly how she was going to tiptoe quietly up to a fairy and gently lay the net over it. Then, she was going to speak very politely to it. She thinks speaking politely involves holding your hands sweetly under your chin and speaking in a high voice. “Hello little fairy. I won’t hurt you.” Fairies like politeness. She poured the pink glitter into the catching jar so the baby fairies would have the most gorgeous sandbox ever.
This morning, before she came into the kitchen, I absentmindedly spread a circle of rose petals around the sandbox. When Annabelle came in, she was thrilled. “Mom!! The fairies came again and played a trick on me! They played in the sandbox and left me rose petals.”
Later tonight, we were cleaning the kitchen. For Annabelle, this meant standing at the kitchen window, singing like Giselle to call in the chipmunks to some clean for us. For Henry, it meant taking the broom and the feather duster and making an even bigger mess, all the while singing, and for me, well, it meant trying to clean up–actually clean up. I FINALLY finished sweeping when Henry decided he wanted to keep sweeping and swept all the rose petals and glitter onto the floor so he could sweep it up. I swept that up, and he took the mop and tried to mop the table, spilling the vase of flowers I had sitting there all over the floor. We promptly tried to clean that up, and Henry ended up slipping and falling flat on his back.
He was very upset until Annabelle gave him one of her Barbies to play with–the one with the red hair we’d braided to make her look more like Pippi. Henry was delighted and kept saying “HI” over and over again. Annabelle’s favorite part of Pippi Longstocking is when Pippi decides to go find some “things” to take home and she finds a sleeping old man and wants to take him home to add to her collection.
These are our days–fairies, Pippi, and Tennessee Williams…