Minnesota Winter of our Discontent

photo by Paul L Dineen.

I wake up now in the squall of night. Nothing stirs outside but the wind in the bows and the rush of air through barren limbs. Sounds like water rushing in to flood our streets, to pool at our back doors. One could only wish it were water that would offer some hope of draining away in a few days; anything other than this opaque northern night. It’s what makes us Minnesotan; these long winter months in a land that others cringe to see when their plane descends beneath the layer of clouds that hang over us. If they were only nice clouds, puffy like cotton; but no, they are like the dirty banks of snow, sand, and salt that line our streets. They are dirty like the fast food bags and tires and newspapers that are exposed as the snow recedes in April.

But this very trauma that is our winter makes artists of us all. What else do we have to do with our mornings and evenings than to introspect, to read a book or go down to the basement with guitar or paints? Who would want to wile aways the hours at the park or beach in a forsaken land; unless you are one of those people who skis, sleds, or skates - but those are the few of us lucky enough to have sustained a head injury during our youth, sliding into a tree trunk or having your skates sweep out from under you to crack your skull against the ice. Nobody of healthy mind would go out there. But we call it home. Minnesota nice. The land of 10,000 lakes filled with Walleye; fitting that our state fish is milky-eyed and can only see the dim depths of the deepest lake holes. Fitting that our Loon laughs like a mad hatter in those fleeting, goading days of summer.

Rev Robert Kirk - The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Faeries

Bramble and Briar

photo by zero239.

All I had really wanted to do was plant a quiet little garden in the back corner of my yard, but once I’d wandered into the wild bramble and briar, the tangled buckthorn and thistle, I felt the hairs on my neck tingle as I caught a faint whispering on the breeze. I felt as though eyes were watching me from behind every leaf, but when I’d turn to catch whoever it was, the undergrowth would bounce back into place and the sound of scurrying fell back to quiet.

I’d tried my best to ignore it, but deeply shaken, I retired for the afternoon to my den, which afforded a view of the unkempt back corner of my lot, and poured myself a brandy. Then a scotch. Then some whiskey. By the time night fell, it was either the drink or the dark, but I could distinctly see tiny little lights dancing about the brambles, and by midnight, eyes grown heavy and now on my hands and knees at the windowsill, I perceived little figures marching out of the undergrowth, across the lawns towards my house.

Then came a rap upon the door. I jumped, so startled that I knocked over a plant beside me. I opened the door. Nothing there. Closed the door. I retired to my bed, where I thought I heard raucous voices outside, but fell asleep in the stupor of the tired and drunk.

Each night thereafter we repeated the proceedings of the night before; Me, drinking desperately and rubbing my blurry eyes while on hands and knees at the window; and Them, tiny illuminated creatures, faun and faerie alike, marching out from the bramble and briar in a herald of singing and music. They were a rowdy, bawdy bunch to be sure, hacking down my newly planted posies, peeing in the bird bath, rutting in the limbs of the crab apple tree. They were more ethereal than corporeal, made more of firefly light than that of our mortal clay. The faun — half man and half goat with their ears hanging low and chin beards foamed with beer — brayed at the neighbors’ dogs to egg them on. The trooping faeries, though made of finer features and higher born, were equally full of mischief and revelry.

They had come finally for me, after all these years, to reclaim their changeling left in the bed of a kidnapped child. My parents, now dead and gone, had always suspect I was not theirs, but could they have guessed who I was? Could any of us have guessed that one day this bastard child of the Faerie King of Bramble and Briar would be called back home to his father’s court? I doubted that, as I finally answered the door on that last night and followed the hidden people across the lawn, with each step growing smaller, each step peeling away the dried out husk of my flesh, exposing the glowing light inside my chest, the tiny light to pierce the night.