Chapter 1  Loose Ends

A question burned inside me that afternoon, but it was much too late to ask it as well. As silly as this may sound, I longed to know about Queen Thimble Bee and whether Mom had written the fairy letters. That unanswered question went all way back to my childhood, and it began with Phyllis and the fairy experiments.

Phyllis lived up the street from our home in the Tennessee hills and was two years older than me. Even though other nine-year-olds lived in the neighborhood, I preferred Phyllis because she found endless ways to entertain me. She taught me how to make a grapevine swing and led me through the dark ravine below her house in search of praying mantises. We tended to injured grasshoppers in our bug hospital—after scorching their behinds with a match.

Phyllis and I were bonded—something like sisters, but without the fighting—and we decided to seal the pact. With her dad’s razor blade, we each cut a tiny square on the side of our knee and mingled our blood, which, she said, made us blood sisters. Lucky for us, we didn’t become infected.

Phyllis insisted fairies were real. We practiced trying to shrink down to fairy size one afternoon because, more than anything else, we wanted to transform ourselves into fairies. Concentrating with all our might, we sat against the shady brick wall of her house with legs outstretched, breathed ourselves into hyperventilation, and commanded ourselves to shrink. When we opened our eyes, we felt dizzy and were convinced that our bodies had shortened, just a little.

I told my mother about the fairy experiments.

I turned ten in October of 1954. Three months later, on Christmas morning, I awoke to find four shiny pink tinsel trees rooted in Styrofoam on my bedside table. A large letter made of aluminum foil and inscribed in swirly script was taped to my bedroom windowpane. It read:

I called my mother to come and see what had appeared in my room. She hugged me and hovered over my shoulder as I removed the foil letter, one corner at a time. We reread it together. Truly, a miracle had happened, she agreed. My whole body glowed with euphoria. I had been personally contacted by a tiny being who lived in our woods. I have no memory of what my father thought about this, but my mother smiled broadly as I experienced the first thrill of magic. Before the day was over, I had called Phyllis and written a thank you note to the fairy. I placed it on my windowsill, and then I waited.

I awoke every morning in eager expectancy and checked the windowsill to see if my note had been answered. Mom asked me if I had heard anything. Weeks passed, and I felt glum. A new letter eventually arrived in the same swirly script as before, but his time it was written on white paper in blue ink.

When each Saturday night rolled around, the magic created by F.Q. Thimble Bee’s letters evaporated. In its place, a discordant scene unfolded. Mom would come into my room and say, “Lay out your clothes for tomorrow.”

I would whine, “Can’t we stay home?”

Her back would stiffen. “No, we’re all going to church tomorrow. We are a family and this family goes to church.”

“But I don’t want to go. Why can’t I stay here while you and Pop go?”

My mother never asked me why I didn’t want to attend church or what I was afraid of. Had she done that, she might have discovered a shy girl who was fearful of other children, especially older boys who teased her during the weekday school bus ride across town. The bratty boys attended our church, and I dreaded encountering them in the subterranean Sunday School halls.

The scene repeated itself each week. On the rare Sunday when my parents stayed home, I exulted in the joy of a Sunday without dressing up. I despised wearing dresses and patent leather shoes, white gloves, and hats—all the trappings of someone I wasn’t.

I was a tomboy, a tree climbing wood nymph. Cutting paths through our three acres of woods and watching pollywogs grow legs in our backyard pond were my favorite pastimes. On other days, I would find a sturdy grapevine and make a swing over one of our four sinkholes. Our property was filled with oak, beech, hickory, walnut, and ash trees. Grapevines hung from the canopy. Mayapples and jacks-in-the-pulpit sprouted from the understory in the spring. Backlit redbud leaves were my stained glass windows; wind blowing through elms, my organ pipes; and cricket song, my choir. Church, with its sanctuary of starched and primped glazed-eyed sheep, held no relevance for me whatsoever.

The following summer, Phyllis and her family moved to a new subdivision in the county. I never saw or heard from her again.

I kept writing to the fairy, who wrote back from time to time. When she did, I would show the letter to my mother. In fact, together we designed our own “fairy paper” using vegetable oil and food coloring on parchment. I placed the paper creations on top of our upright piano for Queen Thimble Bee and waited for her to find them.

With each letter, my love for Queen Thimble Bee grew. The letters always appeared during the week, never on Sunday mornings, which was a good thing, because Sunday was my least favorite day of the week. My stomach curdled each Saturday night. I hoped I’d be sick in the morning. I became filled with dread over the prospect of confronting my mother again. Church wasn’t so much the issue and neither were the bratty boys. It was the need to exert my will, express my side of the story, and be recognized as a real person in the family. I craved some shred of independence. Sunday morning wasn’t the only place and time when it became obvious to me that I was still a child with no rights. I also fought with Mom over dance and piano lessons. But Sunday was the worst. I dawdled in the bathroom. I tried to make us late. I pouted and hung my head.

Mom would say, “Why aren’t you ready yet? We’re leaving in ten minutes. Come eat your breakfast.”

“I don’t want any breakfast. I can’t find my gloves, my shoes are green, and they stink.” In our dank Tennessee woods, shoes mildewed in the closet.

“Well, clean them or wear a different pair.”

I knew that she wouldn’t resort to spanking on a Sunday morning, but on other days of the week, she and my father often did that to deliver the clearest message in the shortest amount of time. Spare the rod and spoil the child was an adage to which both of them subscribed. My father tormented me with his books, The Care of Children from One to Five, and The Child from Five to Ten. As a World War II Navy man, he believed in raising a child by the book. It wasn’t beyond him to read passages aloud to me to make his points.

None of my excuses or delay tactics worked. Mom stood firm and I caved in every time. I never won a battle with her. My inner fire fizzled and my self-esteem plummeted. It became difficult for me to speak and I was even afraid to answer the telephone.

Mom had grown up in a family of six with three siblings. She stood out from the rest with her blonde hair, blue eyes, and her precocious chatter. As my mother, she talked at me constantly, which left me with little to say. I learned not to express myself so much with my voice , but inwardly. Among the roots of an ancient beech tree, I played with dolls, creating their lives and conversations in my mind.

I assumed she thought that by sending me off to church—as her parents had packed her off to tent meetings—I would become a happy, well-adjusted and religious person. But her strategy only made me more determined to resist. She assumed that I was like her, a social creature who enjoyed weekly contact with friends. I wasn’t. Each day of elementary school created stress from having to interact with so many people. As an only child, I needed weekends to regroup, to reconnect with my trees, the pond, sinkholes and the music of crickets. I would return from church feeling depressed and depleted. The weekly clashes with my mother wore me down and helped build the wall between us that existed until she died.

Meanwhile, letters from Queen Thimble Bee continued to arrive on my windowsill, and every time one appeared, I shared it with Mom. Those loving letters saved my soul. They wedged their way like kudsu vines through the crusty wall I’d erected to keep my mother out.

By the time I was twelve, I was emerging from my shell. I had matriculated from the hated elementary school, where nasty boys on the school bus had taunted me, and entered junior high. My life was a swirl of homework, sleepovers with girlfriends, and boy watching. I was wearing my first almost-flat bra, which meant I was grown up and visible. Larry swished my ponytail. I was in love. Isaac pursued me.

“Dear diary. Well, it looks like I’m done for. Isaac insists on liking me and it’s hard to hold back. Oh me, what can I do? I don’t know whether to like him or not.”

Letters from Queen Thimble Bee tapered off, but I still believed in her and wanted her to write. I was different from my peers in that my budding spirituality was anchored in something tangible: paper and ink. I believed in fairies and the unseen world because I was experiencing a clear and present relationship. I trusted that the letters came from a fairy, a belief that superseded anything I had heard in our church, which, in my youthful opinion, was only hearsay from the distant past. I knew who loved me best.

At twelve, I was eager to draw, paint, and make figures with clay. I credit Mom for letting me glue pieces of stained glass onto our dining room window in a permanent sunburst. She filled one end of our dining room table with a changing display of polished rocks, abalone shells, fresh cut daffodils, dried grass, and Ansel Adams photos. I allowed her into the artist part of myself, as well as the part that revered nature. She was someone I could have loved then, if only she had not been my mother.

I was thirteen when Queen Thimble Bee visited for the last time. Maybe the fairy knew it was time to stop the letters because I was too old for such things. The letters had appeared on my windowsill for three years.

“December 25, 1957. Dear Diary, It’s Christmas! Got two blouses, makeup kit, red pocketbook, and stuffed animals and a note from Santa Claus. Thimble Bee gave me an angel from Brazil.”

When the letters and mementos stopped, I felt sad. But Queen Thimble Bee said she would be with me always, and I believed her. Whenever I was depressed, I took out the letters and reread them.

I still have all twenty-six letters from Queen Thimble Bee. They’re preserved in a blue talcum powder box as my most cherished childhood treasure.

Up until I was thirty-five, I believed that the fairy wrote them. Then I allowed myself to doubt. By then, my own spirituality was securely rooted. It seemed possible that maybe, just maybe, my mother had written those letters. Still, I wanted to believe that she had help from the fairy world. Plenty of opportunities arose for me to ask her, but I didn’t.

When my mother entered the nursing home, her mind was a blur, but she could still remember past events. A week before she died, I considered asking if she had written the letters, but I hesitated. I didn’t want to hear the truth. I wanted some element of magic to remain with me always. I wanted to believe that a filmy fairy queen had changed herself into solid matter and had written those letters. At the very least, I wanted to believe that my mother had written them under the spell of a fairy queen who loved me.

The week before Mom died, I couldn’t tell her I loved her. I had never said those words to her. I envied women who could do that, but sometimes it seemed artificial and overdone. The right time for expressing gratitude and affection would have been when my mother was still of sound mind. What held me back was that I would have had to abandon my resentment and forgive her, and to do that, I reasoned, would have taken a lot of explaining. First, I would have had to tell her about my old childhood anger that still hunkered down at the bottom of my heart—the anger that had hatched during our fights about church and escalated during high school. I’d have had to confess that. Then she would have become flustered and soggy or stoic and rigid. I would have felt remorseful for hurting her and would have told her it didn’t matter anymore when, in fact, it did matter. I would have felt like a torturer for even bringing it up to an eighty-five-year-old woman. Or I might have lied to make her feel better. I needed her to understand why I’d sealed off my love. It never occurred to me that I just needed to forgive the poor woman.

Heaven forbid, she might have unloaded on me, too. She might have nursed a laundry list of old wounds that I had caused. I don’t know if I could have withstood such honesty. I wasn’t willing to leap into this quagmire without perceiving the outcome ahead of time. We had never worked any of this out in the early years. We had each kept mum. We had never aired our grievances in an old-fashioned, down and dirty, gut spilling way. Never. In fact, my mother had taught me by example that emotional scenes were to be avoided at all costs. So here she was on her deathbed, and I still carried old grudges from half a century earlier. There were no more chances to say what hadn’t been said or ask what hadn’t been asked, or so it seemed.

The early relationship with my mother set up two contrasting themes that would shadow me all of my life—regret and wonder. The dark and light swirled together like chocolate and vanilla from my tenth year until she died, and beyond.