The Children See a Ghost

Among the tall stalks of elderberry and sassafras, deeply rutted footpaths lead from house to house and then to a paved road. Back in time, the Indians had named this place Ah-Wah, "The Place where Ghosts Walk." When the English move into the area, they named the place, "The Downs."

Doors were left unlocked by day, but at night, doors were locked to keep the ghosts out. Well, that was a superstition that the people in The Downs held in common. On this particular night, Mrs. Bucklin had left her back door open, and, in truth, the door was open no more than a crack in order to let a little cool air into the house. An open door at night in The Downs would have heads shaking, but Mr. Bucklin had complained of the heat in the house, and, in addition, he was not feeling well. And..., it was Christmas.

The footpath that passed by the Bucklin's door was travelled in the night by an hurtful ghost named Dudingston. Dudingston was a tormentor; he would enter the body that had a broken bone, and he would torment the poor soul with doubts and a disagreeable temperament. Just moments after the daylight was gone, Dudingston slithered into the house and took a place close to Bucklin. The evil spirit could only enter a body that had a broken bone, and Dudingston had sensed that there was a broken bone in Bucklin's body. The ghost had sensed it well, Bucklin was a house painter, and he had cracked a bone in his foot while stepping down from a ladder yesterday.

About the time the evil ghost settled next to Bucklin, two plain-faced children came to the back door, and the boy gave three sharp knocks, and called-out, "Hello?"

Mrs. Bucklin came to the door and saw the boy and girl standing there. "Good evening, Mrs. Bucklin, we have stopped by to say hello to Mr. Bucklin."

"Do come in, children. Mr. Bucklin is resting in his chair. He hurt his foot yesterday and could use a little company and cheering up." The children came into the house. The Spirit recognized them for who they were before they entered the room, and the Spirit moved himself into a dark corner. Both children saw the shadow in the corner where there should have been no shadow at all. The children did not have to speak about the shadow. Just a look between them told all that had to be told.

"Joseph, look who has come to visit us." She then asked the children, "Would you children like some milk and cookies, or, perhaps, a bowl of stew?"

"You are very kind to offer. A bowl of stew would be just right," said the girl. "Perhaps we would be able to repay you with a kindness of our own." The evil ghost shifted uneasily in the corner.

Mrs. Bucklin kept a very clean house, and the children sat at the table carefully eating their bowl of stew so as to not spill a drop. When they were finished, the boy took-up three oranges that had been in a bowl on the table and began to juggle them without so much as a glance at the fruit. Then there were four oranges, then five, then six flying through the air. Bucklin clapped his hands, "Glory be, look what he can do. Where did all those oranges come from."

Neither child said a thing. Both children kept watch over the activities of the shadow that was creeping slowly, ever so slowly, towards Mr. Bucklin. The boy gave a nod of his head, and the girl pulled a colorful stick from her sleeve and pointed it towards a spot in the corner. "Be gone!", she said, and the words were so clearly spoken that Bucklin heard the words inside his heads for years to come. The words were followed by a flash of light so bright that it blinded the couple for a minute or two. They heard a clap of thunder that knocked them back in their chairs and kept them pinned there for a minute or more. When they were finally able to see again, the boy and girl were gone. The three oranges were back in the bowl on the table.

The room had the odor of a poorly lit coal fire. "What was that...; who were those children?", Bucklin stammered.

"I thought you knew them; they said they had stopped-bye to see you."

"I'd never seen them before in my life."

The flash of light and the BANG! that followed caused the neighbors to run outside their houses in a panic. A noisy crowd gathered at Bucklin's door and called to the Bucklins. The Bucklins came outside; Mr. Bucklin was as white as a sheet, and Mrs. Bucklin was clearly ill. Both were shaking.

They told the story as best they could and then repeated the story again.
Mildred Nelson had seen the children come to Bucklin's door, or so she said, but Mildred was a drinker, and she was slurring her words. The more she said, the less the people believed her. Then there was Franklin who said the children had arrived with him on the city bus. Again, the account did not hold true to the listeners. In the end, nobody knew very much about what happened that night.

The part of the night the children liked best was when Mrs. Nelson had said that the children had pointed ears and long, pointy noses, which they certainly did not have. A few nights after the departure of Dudingston's ghost, the children appeared in Mrs. Nelson's bedroom and woke her with a song. They had put-on pointed ears and long, pointy noses just to entertain her. She hollered at them, "You children will drive me to drink!"

The boy gave Mrs. Nelson a wink and a smile. She kept the news of the visit to herself, and she never took another drink for the rest of her life. More than that, she had no memory that she had ever taken a drink.

In time, all the people moved away from The Downs. The houses stood for awhile, but without care, all the houses soon fell to the ground, and then they covered with vines.

It was Dudingston's evil spirit that had brought the children to The Downs that night, and on that night, the children, without a care, had sent his ghost straight to Hell for an eternity.

How Liam and Lara Got their Magic

So there he was, the ghost of Paddy Noonan, watching the quiet breathing of two little children on Christmas Eve. Paddy had never seen these children before this night, but he recognized them as soon as he appeared in their bedroom. On his way out of the bedroom, Paddy kissed the forehead of each child, and those kisses moved Paddy's charms from his spirit into their's, and he whispered, "Find the stone." Paddy's kisses and those words changed everything in the lives of these children, as you will see in the events soon to be recalled here.

Paddy had always been quite a wanderer, watch for that in this recollection, and he had always been an adventurer, watch for that, too, but this is Liam and Lara's story now. While their parents slept, they took a walk on a trail in the forest and became lost, but there, I'm getting ahead of myself in the telling of events.

The story starts the day after the ghost of Paddy Noonan visited the two children, Christmas Day. The Christmas dinner had been put away, and the parents had quieted down into an afternoon nap.

Poppa was asleep on the couch. Momma was asleep in a big soft chair. The other Poppa and Momma had put themselves to bed for a long, long sleep. Before she went to sleep, Momma had told Lara, "Take good care of your little cousin. Keep him entertained."

"I will, Momma. I'll keep him entertained."

Lara had been born on Christmas eve, and her parents had named her, "Merry." Liam had been born a few minutes later, and his parents had named him, "Christmas." Those names had worked-out pretty well at home, but they had not worked-out very well at school with the other children.

So, when they were six years old, they re-named themselves Lara and Liam. They decided that he was to be, "the little cousin," because he was already a good deal taller than she. There was no sense at all in being serious, they agreed.

Here they were on another Christmas Day, standing in the living room, being quiet so they would not disturb their sleeping parents. Liam had been given a baseball bat for Christmas, which he had been swinging at an imaginary ball and hitting it solidly every time. Lara had been given a magic wand, a plastic tube filled with gel and glitter. She had just noticed that on the side of the wand in very small print were the words: to activate the magic in this wand, phone 869-111-2468.

Lara made the telephone connection, and an old woman's voice asked, "Name and location, please."

She answered: "My name is Lara, and I'm standing in the living room."

"Very good," said the old woman. "Your magic command is, let me see..., it is here somewhere. Yes, "BY THE GHOST OF PADDY NOONAN," that is your magic command. You do not say the words out loud, you just think them; that's for security purposes. Use the magic wisely. Do not call upon magic to do the things that you can do for yourself. We put the magic in the wand, and we can take the magic out of the wand!"

At that moment, the wand had instantly become lighter, and then Lara ducked quickly as the imaginary ball that rocketed off Liam's bat whizzed above the back of her head.

Something had happened to her during the telephone call. She did not quite know what had happened, something had happened. She heard herself call to her younger cousin, "Liam! Get your coat. We're going out for an adventure!"

He did not say anything, he just looked out the window at the rain, which was coming down in sheets. After a while he said, "I don't want to get wet."

She swung the magic wand through the air, "Then I'll turn you into a frog. Frogs don't mind getting wet," she said helpfully, remembering that her mother had told her to take good care of her little cousin.

"Whoa, whoa," he said quickly, as he watched the wand swing in his direction. "I never said I wasn't going." He added, "I just want to know, where are we going?"

"We are going to find a rainbow and the pot of gold buried under the spot where the rainbow touches the ground."

"I'll get a shovel." Liam dropped his imaginary ball to the floor and put his bat next to it.

"You better get that bat, too. You never know when you are going to have to whomp someone or..., some thing."

"Right," he said, picking-up the bat. He took two mighty swings, one to the left and one to the right. He was not hitting imaginary balls anymore. Two imaginary house-dragons dropped to the floor on either side of him.

Lara stepped over one of the dragons and wrote a brief note to the both sets of parents, "Gone for an adventure. Will be back later today or tomorrow or sometime. Don't worry."

Off they went. They were walking on a curved path. It seemed like they were walking in a big circle or, maybe, a spiral. Soon there was no turning back, they noticed, because when they did look back, there was no path behind them. They did not know where they were, and they did not know the way home; they were lost. Then the worst happened.

Liam stopped in mid-stride and dropped to the ground. It was dead quiet all around them. The birds had stopped flying, the leaves on the trees had stopped moving, even the rain had stopped falling. He pointed towards a long shadow leaning against the side of a tree. "What is that?" His voice had taken on a hissing quality that made the hairs on Lara's neck stand straight. She knew what it was. There was no sense trying to run away. Nobody could not outrun that thing.

"That's a wicked witch," and after a long pause, she said. "Run right at her, and swing your bat like you were going to knock her head off. Go! Go!"

He found his legs running underneath him, carrying him closer and closer to the shadow. He was swinging his bat harder than he had ever swung it before, his voice let out a scream that split the air and shook the ground. The witch stepped away from the tree and onto the path. She was a terrible sight with her black pointed hat, her wire rimmed glasses perched on her crooked nose, her black dress covering her from the top of her neck to the top of her black pointy shoes. He stopped running and stood still. He wanted to swing his bat, but the bat would not move.

The witch reach out and grabbed him by his shirt and pulled him to her. Then, the witch's other arm stretched out a very long way and grabbed Lara by her hair and pulled Lara to her.

"Well, my little imps, out for an adventure, are you? Having a good time, are we?" Her voice cracked through the air around them like it was ice. "Well, I think I'm holding my dinner." Then, she pulled out a magic rope that began to tie Liam's feet together, and then his knees.

He could see where this was going, and he did not like it. He took a mighty swing with his bat and knocked the glasses from her crooked nose. Without her glasses, the witch could not see the children. She reached out and grabbed hold of a tree and muttered a curse or two and shook the tree so hard that it came out of the ground before she realized that she did not have hold of the boy with the bat. She bent over and started feeling the ground, hoping to catch a child by the foot, but Liam got in back of her and hit her so hard on her behind that she flew through the air and landed in a mud puddle, and she couldn't get up because the mud held her fast to the ground.

Liam held his bat high above his head, ready to deliver another blow. It was then that he saw his older cousin, sitting on a rock eating an apple as if she did not have a care in the world. She looked at him and asked in a crackling voice that imitated the voice of the wicked witch, "Having a good time, are we?"

"No..., well, yes...." Then he brightened, "I just had a wonderful adventure."

"Very entertaining I'd say. Remember that, in case my mother asks."

He saw the basket of apples by the side of the tree, and realized that he was hungry. He picked-up the largest, shiny one. Just as he was about to take a bite, he heard his cousin's warning, "Don't bite that apple!"

"Why? ...Is it a poison apple?"

She just smiled.

He said to himself, "Of course it is a poison apple." He looked at the apple, and on the red surface he could see the image of the witch earlier in the day painting the apple with a brew of poison and placing the apple in the basket. He picked another apple from the basket, one that was not so big and not so shiny. He looked at it, and then he took his first bite." His cousin nodded her head and smiled, "Now you are getting smart."

He finished his apple and said, "I think it is time to move-on, let's go!", and he picked-up his shovel and his bat and started walking.

"Not so fast," said the wee faerie, who had spent the day riding on Lara's ear, hidden by Lara's curly hair. "You might not want to leave the wicked witch stuck in the mud. You'd want to set her free, I'd say."

Wise children know that good faeries are not to be ignored when they speak into your ear. Lara called to her cousin, "Wait! We have to free the witch."

Liam could not believe what he had just heard. "Did you just say, free the witch?"

"Yes, free the witch."

"Have you ever done this before, freed a wicked witch?"

"No." Lara gave him a smile and said, "I have a plan." She held her hand up to keep him from speaking and added, "Stand-back. I got this plan from my good faerie."
But Liam did not stand-back; he went dangerously close to the witch, and gave her shoe a little kick, and then he asked, "Are you dead?"

She crackled, "Of course I'm not dead you dreadful little boy."

Lara stepped forward, "I'm going to get you out of the mud puddle, you wicked witch, and it won't cost you much."

"How are you going to get me out of this mud, you dreadful little girl?"

"Magic!"

"You have magic? Magic? Well, why didn't you say so before I grabbed the boy? I wouldn't have grab you if I knew you had magic." Then she wailed, "Get me out of this mud, I have to pee."

The little faerie riding on her ear whispered, "Get her wishing stone."

"First, the cost: Hand-over your wishing stone..., give it to my favorite cousin, the wonderful cousin you called a dreadful little boy."

"Get me out of here, then I'll give you the wishing stone."

"First the wishing stone, then I'll get you out of the mud."

The wicked witch seemed to think about this for a moment, and then a smile could be seen on her lips, if you can call the sneer on a wicked witch's face a smile. "Okay, I'll hand-over the wishing stone, what is he going to wish for, candy? I'll just give him some candy. Then he won't have to carry the stone around. It is very heavy. I think that I will be able to climb our of the mud by myself when I don't have this heavy wishing stone holding me down."

The little faerie sitting on Lara's ear whispered, "Get her to give Liam her wishing stone. It is not heavy at all."

Lara told the witch, "Pass-over your wishing stone if you want me to release you from the mud puddle."

The witch started screaming at the top of her voice, "Who told you about the wishing stone?" The witch started kicking her feet and slapping her hands and mud was flying everywhere. She was huffing and puffing and kicking and slapping, on and on, but she could not get herself out of the mud. When she finally stopped, unable to let out even a single scream or kick a single kick because she was so tired, the witch heard a sweet little voice say, "Pass me the wishing stone right now, or my cousin and I are leaving, and you can stay stuck in the mud until the end of time if that suits you better than passing over your wishing stone." The children began to walk away.

"I'll do it, I'll do it!", then it appeared, a round white stone that looked like the full moon shining in the night sky. It rolled out of the witch's hand and rolled across the ground to Liam's feet. He reached to pick it up, and then it was in his hand, smooth to his touch and a little warmer than his hand, lighter than a feather. He knew to put the stone in his pocket, and when he did, something happened to him. He did not quite know what had happened, but he knew something had happened, and now he was different.

Then a question occurred in Liam's head. Why didn't the witch use the wishing stone to wish herself out of the mud? Something was not right here. Just about the time Liam thought of his question, his good faerie woke up from a long nap. The faerie remembered Liam's question because it had been part of the faerie's dream. The good faerie got close to Liam's ear and whispered, "The wicked witch did not know the Magic Command to get the wish out of the stone."

Liam's head jerked back, and he said out loud, "I don't know the Magic Command."

The witch started crackling and giggling, "You fooled yourselves, but a promise is a promise. You said you would release me from this mud. Now, do it!"

"Hold on," said Lara to Liam, "Did you read the fine print on the stone?"

Both Liam and the witch asked at the same time, "There's fine print?"

"Of course there is fine print; there is always fine print."

Liam brought the stone out into the light, and read these words from print that was so small that only a child could read it, "BY THE GHOST OF PADDY NOONAN."

Lara was quick to add, "Don't say the words out loud, only think them. That is for the purpose of security."

Liam was a quick learner, and, so, he thought, BY THE GHOST OF PADDY NOONAN, and then he said, "Release the witch from the mud."

And..., it happened. The witch was standing before them, and she was gathering up all her meanness to cast a spell on the children and to regain the wishing stone, but then Lara brought forth her plan. Lara pointed her magic wand in the direction of the witch and thought the words, BY THE GHOST OF PADDY NOONAN, and then said, "Turn this wicked witch into a good witch!" Just as Lara said the words, "Good witch," the black pointed hat started to turn into a jewelled crown, and the long black dress started to turn into a long gown made from white silk, and the pointy black shoes started to turn into golden slippers.

The witch screamed, "No! No! I hate being good. Don't do this to me, I'll be ruined. No..., no..., no." With each word, her voice became softer and softer and softer, until finally she turned into a beautiful, good witch, in truth, she turned into a fairy godmother. "Oh, dear. What happened to me? I feel so good." The good witch twirled to the left and then twirled to the right. She looked at the children as if she were seeing them for the first time. "Oh! Are you Darlings lost in the woods? What can I do to help you two lovely children?"

"We are doing pretty well on our own, and best of all, we have each other."

"You can be a fairy godmother to someone else. Don't let us keep you."

"Oh, goodness, someone does need my help." POOF, the fairy godmother disappeared.

"She's gone!"

"Good! She would just be in our way, you can carry goodness too far. Sometimes you have to be a bit... final with people and things. Have you ever been to The Downs?"

"Where is that?" Liam was quiet for a moment. He was thinking of his mother and father, soon to awaken from their afternoon nap. They had enough to worry about without worrying about him. His parents were going back to prison after the Christmas holiday. Of course they were not guilty, but that did not change anything. He said, "I think we better get back."

Lara read the expression on his face, and said, "Yes, we better, but first we will stop in The Downs. We have something to do there. It won't take us but a few minutes. Look at your white stone, I think it will show us the way."

Liam reached into his pocket. There was a hazy image on the surface of the stone. As soon as he rubbed his finger across the image, the children found themselves standing on a dirt path facing the door of a small, decrepit cottage. He said, "I think we should see who is inside."

Working on Global Warming

I just heard this song and thought it might be enjoyed by some.
The song below is sung by the faerie children while at school during recess.
They sing the song while strutting like roosters, crowing to the sky, the melody is similar to, "Ring Those Bells."

From the southern tip of Florida and up north to Canada
The eastern part of North America is an ancient forest
in decline, in decline. Now do not whine
No, do not whine about this decline.

It is a great case for laughter to see what people have done
To this ancient forest as the trees have been cut and
The ground disturbed to the point of erosion. The soil is covered
with houses and businesses, roads, and parking lots.

Faerie children laugh when people yell, "Save the rain forests!"
While they destroy the environment in which they live.
They call themselves, "Wise," but, really, they are funny.
Coo-coo. Coo-coo. Coo-coo. Coo-coo.

Backyard Garden

The young girl and her father walked hand-in-hand through the back yard to a small garden along the fence line. The girl was a favorite of the house faeries who, at that moment, flitted above and around her, leaving an aura of faerie dust above her head, some of which fell into her hair and along her shoulders and arms. You would have had to be mirthless or cold-hearted to miss seeing the magic in the scene.

She had been born on the first day of Spring, three years earlier. This was to be her first garden. The father, who had his share of faerie dust falling down over his head, had sharpened the end of a stout stick, and he showed his little-one how to make a furrow in the soil. He handed her a radish seed that had been soaking in water overnight. She put the seed into the furrow, covered it with soil, and patted the soil until it was firm. They repeated the task until they had seven seeds planted in the ground. The father showed his little darling a picture of a radish from the packet of seeds, and told her, "In three weeks, we'll have radishes."

Three weeks it was; father and child were standing in front of seven radish plants. The little-one took the pointed stick and loosened the soil. She gently lifted each radish to her father's hand. All was well. The father said that he would wash the radishes, and then they would be ready to eat.

Now, if you know anything about radishes and children, you know that a three-year-old girl is not going to like the taste of a radish, and the father knew this, too. So, during the washing, he substituted ripe cherries for the radishes, and he brought seven cherries to the table. The father removed the cherry stone from a cherry, placed the seed on a plate, and placed the cherry in the little girl's hand. She popped the cherry into her mouth. They did this seven times.

The father took the packet of radish seeds from his shirt pocket and said, "You liked them. Let's plant some more radishes." He was surprised that she seemed to pause, then the little girl picked-up the seeds that he had placed on the plate and added, "Yes, and let's plant some cherries, too!"

The faeries fell all over each other laughing and cheering and throwing faerie dust into the air. That day people reported seeing rainbows in the sky, which seemed odd because the weather service reported that there had been no rain.

Police arrest Mr. and Mrs. Morgan

It was mid-morning on the second Saturday in July when a black funeral car slowly rolled down the dirt road, with the driver and the attendant looking left and right and, then, left and right again. The lettering on the side window read, King's Funeral Home. The car stopped in front of a line of mailboxes at the end of the road, raising a cloud of red dust. The men inside the car studied the names on the mailboxes. The attendant got out of the car; a half-dozen people were looking at him. He was dressed in a heavy, woollen black suit, brimmed black hat, and his shiny black shoes were collecting road dust. Heads were popping out from a couple of doorways to take in the sight. The fat man in the black suit asked nobody in particular, "Which house belongs to Mr. Morgan?", and he pointed to the third mailbox, MORGAN, as if that might help us.

Mr. and Mrs. Morgan lived in a little, sunken house which was connected by a footpath to the line of mailboxes. Mr. drove a public bus, and Mrs. worked in a bar in the downtown. I pointed to the brown house at the end of the path. "Over there."

The driver got out of the car, he had on the same black suit as the first man, same brimmed black hat, shoes collecting dust. The two beefy fellows began to push and pull a narrow bed on wheels over to the Morgan's door. I had never seen one before, but I knew that this bed on wheels was used to collect dead bodies. After a few knocks on the door, Mrs. Morgan slipped through the opened door and closed it after herself. The men removed their hats and said a few words to her. Mrs. Morgan had a "nervous condition," which caused her to be excitable. We heard her raise her voice. Mrs. Morgan was pointing her finger at the men, and she took a swing at one of them. The black suited fellows started to back away from Mrs. Morgan, who was now waving her arms wildly and cursing, and the men pulled their bed on wheels as fast as they might while in retreat.

A helpful fellow named Charlie went over to Mrs. Morgan to find out if she needed any help, and that is how he got the story: Some "son-of-a-bitch" had called King's Funeral Home and asked them to pick-up the remains of Mrs. Morgan. She did not appreciate this one bit, particularly the "remains" part because she thought it referred to her big behind, which she had heard about more than a few times growing-up. You couldn't keep that kind of thing quiet while growing-up.

By this time her nervous condition had kicked-in, and she was in a full rant. Spit had dried along the corners of her mouth, and she was throwing dirty-looks at the spot vacated by the funeral car, which is why she was the first to see Taylor's Moving Van rolling down the dirt road, heading towards the mail boxes. People looked where she was looking, and a few breathed the words, "Oh, no."

Taylor and two of his sons got out and looked at the names on the mailboxes. People made a little room between Mrs. Morgan and the Taylors. Taylor asked, "Which is the Morgan's House?" All eyes turned to Mrs. Morgan, who was silenced..., for a moment. Then she let out a string of curses, some of which had never before been heard by the women and children. Some of the mothers covered their children's ears, and some mothers told Mrs. Morgan to shut her mouth. Then the squawking got really loud, like chickens when they are about to lay their eggs--cluck-cluck-CLUCK-CLUCK-CLUCK!

I watched a truck as big as the moving van as it pulled in behind Taylor's. Two men dragged a stove and refrigerator onto the tail-gate before asking the directions to the Morgan's house. Just then, you could hear the WA-WA-WAs from the police cars' sirens, and those cars were throwing dust to the sky as they raced down the road. It had been reported to the police that Mrs. Morgan had shot off a pistol at a crowd of people. The police were not put-off by her cursing and slapping. After awhile they wrestled her into the back seat of one of the police cars. That, finally, brought Mr. Morgan out of the house, he hoped to make things better. The first thing he did was to try to pull Mrs. Morgan out of the police car. Things did not get any better until the police wrestled him into the back seat of the second police car. Then both police cars sped away.

The story was told and retold and improved and degraded for the rest of the day. For all the telling, nobody ever got closer to figuring out who was behind it all.

It was summertime, so we didn't go to bed until almost nine. The faeries arrived on my porch a short while later, and they were in rare form, rolling all over the place, each one talking louder than the next, like celebrators at a bartenders' picnic; those from the Morgan House were the jolliest and loudest of all, which should tell you something.

House Faeries in Rhode Island

Often we learn from the experiences of others, and sometimes we can only learn from the experiences of others. Most people have no direct knowledge, no interaction with house faeries. So, I'll take this opportunity to tell you a bit about them. Be open-minded. Yes, house faeries. Read on, and I'll tell you how I came to know about the faeries.

Well, here's the way it happened. When I was a child, in a time before ordinary people had televisions or radios or air conditioning or fans, night-time would come, and people might sit under an electric light bulb for awhile doing nothing, but it was a time of 'early-to-bed.' Adults went to bed at about the same time as children. The parents told the children, "You don't have to go to sleep, but you do have to go to bed and be quiet." The evenings were long and quiet.

My bed was on the front porch, with fly screens separating me from the outdoors, and it was from that location that I first saw, heard, and, later, played with the faeries. Perhaps, I had these opportunities because the faeries in my house were living under crowded conditions, and here is why: some years earlier, 1938 to be exact, a great hurricane whirled through Rhode Island, the State where I later lived. The surge of water raced up Narragansett Bay and washed away half of the houses that were near the shoreline, leaving only cement steps as a reminder of the people who once lived there. The people displaced by the flooding waters moved far and wide, mostly to the City of Providence, but, of course, the faeries stayed. They just moved into the nearest house occupied by people, and that was the house into which I was born. You can just imagine them slapping each other's bottoms and laughing so hard they fell to the floor, to see a baby being born in their house. I am sure that the condition of my birth caused the house faeries to make a special claim on me that invited an intimacy not shared by many other people.

If you have an ounce of goodness in you, the faeries watch over you, steering you to the good and away from the bad. The more goodness you have, the more attentive they are. In the night, when the children and other people are in bed, and there is not much need to assist the people of the house, the faeries get busy about their own business and visit one another by traveling along paths that connect the houses. Being social creatures, they flock to the house that has the largest crowd, which was my house. What do they do when they got together you might wonder. Many things, of course, but they love to tell stories.

On many an evening, the faeries would gather on the front porch of my house, and the best storytellers would tell a story or two, and they did not mind that I was lying there listening; I'm sure they felt that they had a claim on me. Years later, I came to realize that some of the tales were told specifically for my entertainment and benefit. I'd like to tell a few of those stories here, maybe others could be entertained, too.

"Plant Trees," says Guardian Angel

Once, in the past time, I was asked to speak to a church group about the environment. I am not a church goer, but I'm always ready to talk about the environment, not so much because I know a lot, but because I am interested. So, I put on my forestry uniform and walked to the church. I was prepared for everything and for nothing.
The church group asked me: "What does God think about the way people are treating Earth?" Could I know this? I have never received a special messages about the thinking of God. Yet, fortunately, I do have a Guardian Angel who is a helpful soul, given half a chance. My Guardian Angel told me to say this: Worrying about Earth does not help anyone or anything. God does not worry. God has planted many trees. If you want to improve Earth, do as God has done, plant trees."

About (the former) Bartram Forest

On September 25, 1969, Governor Lester Maddox signed an Executive Order transferring the property from the Department of Public Health to the Forestry Commission. Today it is used for timber production and Environmental Education. Students come from all around the state to learn about succession and conservation. There are many hiking and biking trails for recreational use as well. Bartram forest is maintained by prescribed burnings.

The first great naturalists in colonial America were John Bartram (1699-1777) and his son William Bartram (1739-1823). Together and separately they traveled throughout the eastern parts of America documenting native plants with drawings and written descriptions.   In his book Travels (1791) William Bartram describes crossing the Oconee River and traveling across what is now the southern part of Baldwin County, Georgia. In these travels he crossed the land of Baldwin State Forest. In deciding what to name the educational component of the Baldwin State Forest it was decided by the Georgia Forestry Commission to honor the works and history of these pioneer naturalists with hopes of continuing their spirit of exploration, learning, and sharing with others (Note:  This para is From Georgia Forestry Commission website)

Welcome!

Hello, My name is John Gormly, formerly of Rutgers University and most recently of Bartram Forest and the Georgia Forestry Commission. I have started this blog to present my ideas about our planet, Earth, and about food-crops, water, and building good soil.

While at Bartram Forest I lived the principle of No Child Left Inside. In the forest, children focus their attention on birds, wildflowers, trees as they walk our trails and visit our interactive lesson sites. Bartram Forest absorbs the excessive energy of children and leaves them in a peaceful but alertly attentive state.

Bartram Forest is also a demonstration site for university students and other adults; see Southern Pine Beetle Control and the control or elimination of Non-native Invasive Plants.

We demonstrated the replacement of invasive plants with desired plants, such as a vegetable garden in an area that had previously been invaded by privet. Although we are in a severe drought, this garden did not need watering at all this summer. I did add some lime to the area.

I hope you enjoy my blog.
John