Is There a Brownie in the House?

I’ve always been a little wary of the twee world of ‘faerie’.  There’s something in my rather dour nature that just can’t take to the picture book world of sweet little elves scrambling over blackberry bushes and sniffing the flowers.  Besides, I’ve never quite understood the need to change spellings; to me magic doesn’t need an extra ‘k’ for it to work, any more than ‘Summer Fair’ needs to be spelled as ‘Fayre’ in order to bring in the punters.  But maybe that’s just me being pedantic.  I come from a far off time when spelling was stressed (and dreaded) from age five onwards.  It’s a habit that’s hard to break.

So for me, fairies, if they exist, must at least spell their name properly.  This still leaves the problem of whether we really do share our lives with mostly invisible, mischievous creatures that live under a hill and guard a pot of gold.  If you’d asked me what I thought about fairies up until five years ago, I’d have smiled and shaken my head.  Of course they didn’t exist.  At least, not until I actually saw them for myself.

Bear in mind that I am not young.  My impressionable days (if I ever had any) are long past.  I don’t need miracles in order to be a Pagan, I’ve been one since the early 1960’s.  I’ve never done LSD so what happens next wasn’t some sort of hallucinogenic flashback.

Instead, I was sitting in my garden on a warm day not long after Beltane, just enjoying the sunshine and birdsong.  In the course of about half an hour I saw that not only were there fairies at the bottom of my garden, but one of them flew up (yes, they do have wings) and started prodding me.  The first thing that struck me was that they are much like the most sentimental images you see on blank birthday cards.  Wings shimmering, beautiful colours; you name it, I saw it.  Some were very small, about six inches long, one was a good three foot tall.  I came away from it all quite shaken, I can tell you.  It’s not every day that the cherished beliefs of a lifetime take such a battering.

Yet still it took me a while to get to grips with the idea that we have a house brownie.  I’ve never seen him, I’ve just seen what he does, which can involve materialising missing objects before my eyes.  He’s extremely helpful; I’m not sure why we all think he’s a male, perhaps because unlike many of his species he’s not fond of housework.  I never come downstairs and find he’s done the washing up, for instance. 

But he does a great job of finding things that go missing, even when I’ve lost something outside the house, he brings it back home.  We were convinced we had dropped a cheque in a shop in Cowbridge.  We searched everywhere we could think of in the house, the car, my handbag and even phoned the shop.  Then suddenly something caught our eye (there were three of us in the room at the time) fluttering about a metre off the ground in the middle of the room.  No prizes for guessing what it was – the missing cheque. 

I used to panic when I lost things (which is often).  I don’t anymore.  We just ask the house brownie to help us find it and always remember to thank him when he does.  Recently a friend of mine has noticed odd things happening in her house.  Small pebbles appear on her lawn early in the morning that weren’t there the day before.  Plants (not weeds) have suddenly started growing in pots that have been empty for years.  All signs, I have found, that the fairies are trying to let her know they are there.  She is delighted; she’s well up on faerie lore. 

Me, I just wish people would spell it properly!