tokeloshe reins

Tokeloshe is a Good Fairy, guardian of the trees. He is mischievous and likes to cause you to trip over fallen branches. He loves beauty and makes petals float down, seed pods spin through the air and leaves burst into fiery or cool colours. Tit Tat is the queen of the fairies and is neither good nor bad. One must be wary though of Tit Tat, she had many fairy children and hid them here and there, woods, home and valley. She's forgotten where they all are and even what they look like and so mournfully spends her days searching, searching.... Sometimes a mortal child wanders across her path and she tries to tempt him to fairy land where he will forget all and never return home. Sometimes she is so convinced that a mortal child is her own she follows her. Placating her is easy enough. She likes to sleep, slumbering on clusters of silky seed fluff in tiny dry nooks, she adores salt and chocolate and can easily be distracted. Tiny boats floating downstream delight her and she is much diverted.



Tokeloshe has entranced us for days and days now with silken floaty showers of fluff. They spin in the air, lazy and gentle puffs of summer snow flakes. They coat everything here, ground, trees, washing line..... all day long they float and shimmer... fairy dust.







We gather some and turn it into a bed for Tit Tat in the old stump of tinder dry half-tree.





Felix wonders if Esmé dressed in fairy wings will she be mistaken for a lost fairy child. Sly Esmé has fast legs and shares her chocolate aplenty on frock, table and floor, a trail of sweetness to placate an army of sleepy wandering fairies.



Under this tree Tokeloshe performs the best show of glitzy fairy dust. There's a heady scent of sweetness and warmth under the cool tree that hums me to into a rich reverie. I can half see bouncing children (protected by a magical fairy-proof netting) and sometimes the rest of the world is gone, or at least shrinks to fit in to a whole leaf. I see a mini beast tiger, sipping from a fairy plate, shimmering green trunks, home to the entire universe...









Delicious.

After a day of story weaving non fairy children are as dirty as ever they could be.



Especially after days smearing the red clay of the stream bank.





Or spent half naked, planting stones in pots of earth to grow into fairy trees; with love and care they often do.





Magically transformed to this:



or this and this and this.....











As the moon rises a soak in the fairy-tub is often called for.