NATURAL PROGRESSION: A
PERSONAL VIEW
DWELLING IN FANCY
By Barbara Tatham Johnson
The door, a thick scrap of hemlock bark about four inches by three inches,
stands ajar where it is installed beneath the exposed roots of a large
spruce tree as if in invitation to a passing neighbor or perhaps to allow
the escape of warm steamy air from a busy kitchen.
I bend low on hands and knees to peer inside, knowing that what I may
discover is entirely up to my imagination. The moss and stick log
construction tucked under the roots is a fairy house, one of many on the
Cathedral Trail through the mossy maritime forest on Monhegan Island, Maine.
For many island visitors this trail is a destination point. Small flimsy
huts of bark pieces lean against each other. Fortified compartments atop a
little ledgy outcrop bristle with the sharp points of skeletonized branches.
Carefully arranged spruce cone cabins with sphagnum roofs, connected by
hemlock cone paths, circle a fanciful free-form sculpture of needleless
spruce twigs. All are built to please their creator’s fancy, and passersby
may admire if they wish.
I am interested in the partly open door. This could very well be a gnome
passageway entry to comfortable living quarters deeper underground. I recall
the charming dwellings in Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet's classic book,
Gnomes. Perhaps a few gnomes arrived in the new world with Viking explorers
and established themselves. I visualize a birch wood paneled kitchen with a
large white stuccoed masonry stove gaily decorated in red, yellow, and green
folk designs. A delicious aroma wafts upward to my nose.
Yes. Spritzar are baking!
My companion suggests a hobbit may live here. “In a hole in the ground there
lived a hobbit,” wrote J. R. R. Tolkien. “It had a perfectly round door like
a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact
middle. The door opened onto a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very
comfortable tunnel without smoke, with paneled walls, and floors tiled and
carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats
and coats—the hobbit was fond of visitors.” Well, this door is definitely
rectangular with no central brass knob, but, if I can fancy gnomes, I cannot
discourage the possibility of hobbits. How fine it would be to hang my
jacket on a hall peg and sit down to tea and a cake or two —or spritzar.
I am partial to dwellings that are cozy and homey, the sort of places where
I could find John Goodall’s Shrewbettina in her almost hobbitlike burrow or
Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, Beatrix Potter’s hedgehog laundress, who, in her hillside
rooms, cares for Lucie’s lost pinny and pocket-handkins as diligently as she
does the wardrobes of her animal neighbors and serves tea in the warmth of
the hob.
If T. H. White can populate a run-down estate with resettled Lilliputians as
he did so wonderfully in Mistress Masham’s Repose, then I can fantasize a
Lilliputian outpost on Monhegan, complete with mice saddled and bridled and
walnut shell cradles. Of course, fairies rely on more ephemeral housing, and
the delicate, if rustic, architecture along the Cathedral Trail suggests
that most constructions suit lives on the wing, so to speak.
The notion of simplicity to the point of primitiveness is attractive. The
cleverness to fashion utilitarian items — buckets, beds, brooms, dishes from
nature’s stockpile of nutshells, plant fibers, ferns, and pebbles must be
admired. William Stieg in Able’s Island provides his marooned but ingenious
mouse with the spare comfort of life in a hollow log, which Able enhances
with a plant fluff bed and sculptures of loved ones just outside.
I admit I admire the Yankee homeliness of Carolyn Sherwin Bailey’s, Miss
Hickory, and her home of “corn cobs, neatly fitted together and glued,” and
its location under the lilac bush. Her pine needle broom, acorn cup and
saucer, and bright quilt of patched sumac leaves provide a spare coziness.
When a chipmunk displaces her, Miss Hickory makes a move to an unused
robin’s nest with a triumph of simple domesticity.
The pleasure of experiencing fanciful possibilities can begin with the
imaginative encouragement of an adult who points out to a child during a
woods walk the first soft pink and green oak leaves as probable material for
fairy garments or berries and nuts as largess for a fairy larder. The joy
can expand as one discovers the literature of magical homes and tiny
inhabitants.
The allure of idealized miniature dwellings is deep. Kenneth Grahame wrote
in The Wind in the Willows, “[mole] stopped dead in his tracks, his nose
searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament,
the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him. A moment, and he
had caught it again; and with it this time came recollections in fullest
flood. Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft
touches waffed through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and
tugging all one way.”
Whether we visualize the furnishings, the pantries, the ambiance of tiny
places as homes for fairies and others or see them as fanciful constructions
in a beautiful place, we recognize the pull of domesticity in a natural
setting, beautifully organized. There is comfort in knowing that here the
resourceful and inventive live in sheltered security.
“All nature is full of invisible people...some of these are ugly or
grotesque, some wicked or foolish, many beautiful beyond anyone we have ever
seen, and...the beautiful are not far away when we are walking in pleasant
and quiet places.”
—Mythologies, W.B. Yeats
(This is the first part of a three-part essay.)
