As a small child, nearly four years old, I was entrusted with the possession of a small book of poems that belonged to my mother. Well worn, with pages falling out and the binding loose in places. Scotch tape on nearly all the pages, placed by a meticulous hand.  The small line underneath the title, “This Book Belongs To”. A faded name, “Mitzi”, the z backwards, written carefully in the blank space reserved just for that purpose.

I was enthralled by The Book. Enchanted by it's bright depictions of faeries, born aloft by lacy glass wings, flittering gently above a meadow, the tips of their dainty toes just skimming the faces of the bright flowers. Tin soldiers, lined up in orderly rows across a young boy's counterpane, bravely fighting mighty battles that only he could see. A girl in a pale pink dress, swinging higher than I dared dream, underneath a mighty tree, hair flying out behind her. And a boy, barefoot, perched high atop a cherry tree.

“Up into the cherry tree,
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands,
And looked abroad on foreign lands.”

Every night I begged my mother to read to me from The Book. I loved hearing the hoof beats of the spooky night-rider  up and down the cobblestone streets in the dim lamplight. I set leaf-boats adrift in a babbling brook, and I wished to someday outrun my shadow. I sailed across the seven sea in a  cardboard box, and smelled the smoke of autumn fires through my bedroom window. I imagined these wonders so vividly that they became real, and when I drifted off to sleep I could hear the echos of my very own faery-land.

So often did I hear these poems that I knew every word, and I would read along with my mother as she read from The Book. The more I heard them, the more vivid my imaginings became, and I took every opportunity to make my world come alive.

“I saw the next door garden lie,
Adorned with flowers, before my eye.
And many pleasant places more.
That I had never seen before.”
“I saw the dimpling river pass
And be the sky's blue looking glass.
The dusty roads go up and down,
With people tramping into town.”

Some children are afraid of heights, they look down and imagine falling. But I was different, I looked down and imagined flying. Every part of me filled with excitement. The higher I got, the more real my dream world felt, and many a time I could have sworn I had glimpsed that world through the leaves of the trees I always climbed. I would see something in the corner of my eye, too fast to be observed in it's entirety, and I would find a way to climb higher than I ever had before. I climbed until my fingers ached and my feet could no longer hold me, and I kept going.

“If I could find a higher tree,
Farther and farther I should see.
To where the grown-up river slips,
Into the sea among the ships.”
There were many trees I conquered. Perched on the tiniest branches in the tips of the trees, high above the rest of the world. My head would poke out above the leaves and I would lift my arms to the sides, balancing on the very tips of my toes. I was weightless and I felt as though I might float away at any moment, set adrift at the slightest touch of a breeze on the back of my neck, or a hastily taken breath. I was no longer bound to the ground like all the others, I could fly away and live with the faeries in my dream world. I was magical. But it always ended, thunder would boom in the distance, or supper was placed on the table. So I climbed down and went inside, the memories of flying but a distant thought to drift into my dreams that night.
“To where the road on either hand
Lead onward into fairy land,
Where all the children dine at five,
And all the playthings come alive.”

(Please note that the sections in quotation marks are not my work. They are excerpts from “A Child's Garden of Verses” by Robert Louis Stevenson.)