Magic!

Thanks to dancinfairy I just became acquainted with Blogging for Books.  I'm still a little vague on the blogging, but shoot, I love books!  I also love competition, so here goes…

Mother Magic

Over the past couple years, I’ve come to realize that parents are really gosh-darn neat people, and I am pretty much always ecstatic when I get to hang out with them.  How on earth did that happen?!  I’m tempted to say Harry Potter-style magic.  Funpersonificarum!  

However, I think it was more likely a quieter, but more common, kind of magic—the kind that works in slow and subtle ways.  When I think about my relationship with my mother, lots of things come to mind.  But there is one moment when I was on the cusp of adulthood that there seemed to be true magic bringing our minds to meet in the same place.

The summer before I started my senior year of high school, my mother and I went on a two-week trip to Ireland.  The bulk of the trip was set up through a travel adventure company that arranged “walking tours,” meaning they would cart your belongings from one bed and breakfast to the next, leaving you with an inadequate map (of the Ring of Kerry in this instance) and unpredictable weather with which to make your way to the next bed and breakfast.  I spent much of this vacation wearing a poncho the size of an eight-person tent while we marched 8 to 12 miles a day.  Obviously not the idea summer vacation for a seventeen-year-old girl missing her boyfriend, friends, and car desperately.  I was kind of cranky. 

One afternoon when the ever-loving water had finally stopped falling out of the sky, we were walking through an incredibly picturesque forest with dappled sunlight and feathery ferns and rich brown soil setting off the verdant greenery.  Even in my state of general crankiness, I had to admit it was a magical, beautiful place. 

My mother turned to me, “Isn’t this just the sort of place you’d expect to see magical creatures?”

I concurred, “Maybe a wee fairy!”

And at that exact moment we both stopped walking abruptly as the tiniest of frogs—no more than an inch from nose to rump—appeared on the path before us.  We exchanged a startled glance before moving on to find a dry spot for lunch, but for quite some time we both took great care in our physical and emotional movements not to disturb any of the magic of that moment.

There in the Irish forest, we met in a middle that was completely removed from either of our realities.  Meaningless conversation and idle joking touched by two great magics, Nature and Coincidence, created the greatest magic of all, Understanding. 

My mother is someone who thinks like I do and is willing to accept the fairy-frog hopping across our path.  I’m not sure it gets any more gosh-darn neat than that.