Invisible Gifts

        It was windy, obviously windy--the long grass swirling around her ankles, still damp from the night's dew--fairy water she'd called it when her boy asked.

"Why is the grass wet in the morning?" he'd said all those years ago. He was 7, maybe 8. "Why is it always wet?"

She didn't know, so made it up, "Fairy Water," she'd said. "The midnight fairies leave it behind when they dance at night."
"Where do they come from?"

She told the truth then, said she didn't know.

"Did you ask them?"

She laughed at herself, now deep in a fairy story she couldn't get out of and, in acknowledgement of the ridiculous tangle she'd caught them both in, said truthfully, "No, I haven't asked them. They have their secrets, you know."

He'd nodded solemnly as if it was obvious that fairies had secrets. Everybody had secrets--right? That thought almost overwhelmed her--Everybody had secrets! Even this child, this impossibly wonderful, inquisitive child had secrets, stories hidden within him. Should she tell the truth about fairies, that she'd never seen one and that, quite possibly, they didn't exist?

"Probably from the woods," he'd said, already ahead of her, figuring out the mystery. "I think they come out of the woods while we are sleeping."

"Yes," she managed to say without laughing. "yes, I think you are right."

"They don't want to scare us," he said, "and when I saw one, she was little, very little."

"You've seen one?"

He'd nodded solemnly and put his finger to his lips. "So small," he whispered, "so really, really small that she was invisible."

"But you saw her?"

"Yes," he'd said, that child of hers so many years ago. She thought of him every morning when the dew was diamonds on the grass and gave thanks for the (also invisible) gift of imagination and story, of the power of memory and, of course, for fairies.