Nearly Midsummer, and life around the Green Man offices has started getting a little weird. Oh, all right, a little weirder. Zina Lee here, reporting in from Kinrowan Hall on abeautiful warm June day. I’ve been noticing that the young plants in the gardens and window boxes have started hitting their stride and the baskets outside the doors are approaching full speed on the floral display. But there’s other stuff going on. The Midsummer Solstice is our namesake’s time, sure, mischievous nature and all, but this is ridiculous.
Things have been going missing a little more often; one puts something down and it disappears — a week later, one finds it in a totally different room than the room from which it went missing. Poltergeists? The early onset of senile dementia? One of The Cats has developed opposable thumbs? Hmmmm.
Inanimate objects — computers, sound equipment, bicycles, you name it — have started developing what might be called personalities, or perhaps a migration path. Surely that computer desktop was different yesterday when you put it to sleep, but you can’t quite think how. One of Reynard’s taps has gotten cranky (okay, so that’s not all that unusual, but throw it in anyway) down in the Green Man Pub, and the musicians in the Neverending Session have recently started complaining of strings that won’t stay in tune, cracks in previously entirely stable reeds (all right, pipers’ complaints can’t be called unusual either), and rosin going missing.
And don’t get me started on the kitchen staff complaints.
Significantly, there’ve been some magnificent displays put on by lightning bugs in the gardens the last few evenings, and the cats have been very alert indeed.
I suppose you could make a case for overflow of life-force, or biorhythms going off kilter, or just that the midsummer energy has gotten into us all (and Kinrowan Hall). But I’m plumping for a slight rash of fairies.
Mind you, not the tall, Seelie noble-looking fairy or elf of literary and celluloid fame, but the average, household, put-the-milk-out-in-a-saucer-so-we-don’t-end-up-cursed-Mildred kind of fairy, common as measles.
I can’t be the only one who has suspicions. The woman on the flower and herb cart at the corner out front is completely out of St. John’s Wort, rue, forget-me-not, rowan, and rosemary, and someone has risked the wrath of old Augustus, our concertina-playing gardener, by taking clippings off the young morning glory vines on the brick wall outside the kitchen garden. I even noticed a new horseshoe hanging up over the door of Gus’s shed near the old stables the other day; I expect not so much for its luck, but for its iron.
And now I’m wondering if it wasn’t Gus who’s been cleaning up the twigs under the rowan copse on the east side of the grounds.
Mind, one wouldn’t want to rid oneself totally of fairies. Besides the fact that they can be just as capriciously generous and benign as they can be suddenly irritable and malign, there’s the wonder factor; life without them might be a bit too grey and predictable. Anyway, when odds and sods go missing, they make excellent scapegoats.
