This week I promised to put some of my writing online here on the blog for members of my writer's group to read. This painting is of my Scottish Grandmother, Emily Jane Giffin, affectionately referred to by most folks who knew her, related or not, by Granny Giffin. This painting is dedicated to all the stories she told me as a child. Please notice the Celtic Cross in the design of the painting adorned with Celtic Knot work. These are all original designs, but the layout itself mimicks the leather book shrine covers made by monks in the 7th and 8th Century in Ireland and Scotland. They were often encrusted with jewels and fine gold filligree. Although mine is made of encaustic wax and paint, it gives the feeling of the embossed leather of the old book shrines, and Granny's portrait takes the place of the Saint's portrait that would have originally been found on the cover. Each of the divisions represents a story that she told me as a child.
I am in the process of writing down all those stories, but in the meantime, here is my latest writing on what it was like to have such a magical Grandmother.
On Being Magic
This week, I found out I am not magic. It was a blow to my self esteem, and I am still somewhat doubtful that the facts I have learned about this “magic business” are true.
When I was young, I had a steadfast belief in many things that the adults in my life seemed to think was nonsense, or to quote my mother “utter foolishness”. Those adult opinions did not stop me, however, from believing not only that I was magic, and that I lived in a world where magic was the natural order of things, but that magic was everywhere, if one only looked. If the grown ups in my life could not recognize it when they saw it, I assumed it was because they didn’t want to.
Fortunately for me, I had a grandmother who encouraged me and allowed me to tell her all about my magical world. Granny told me that in Scotland, where she was from, almost everyone believed in magic, especially faeries. Not surprisingly, she was my favorite grown up.
By the age of 5, I had decided that my cat Snowball was really a fairy queen in disguise. She was a rather large cat, very regal with long fluffy white fur. She had a beautiful pink nose, bright green eyes, and wore a tinkly little bell on a silver chain around her neck. She liked to sit upon pillows and meticulously wash her face and paws both before AND after eating. She allowed me to pet her long silky hair and scratch her chin when she was in the mood, but completely snubbed me and walked away from me with her tail held high in the air at others. She was my confidant, and my only solace when we had to move to a new house, far from my granny, from my favorite tree fort, and my best friend Betsey.
However, I felt as long as I had Snowball around, I was still being watched over by faeries.
One of my magic talents was that I could speed up or slow down time. I often experienced hours that fled by so swiftly that it seemed like only a minute or two had passed. This usually happened when I was happily occupied playing in the yard or drawing in my notebook. I often drew my all but invisible faerie world and the wonderful sprites I encountered there. However, these creatures were very shy, and I could only catch a fleeting glimpse of them from time to time, so my imagination filled in the rest. But if anyone suggested that they were not really there, I would show them my drawings as proof. Usually just in the middle of finally figuring out which tree they were hiding behind, not a minute after I’d started my search, I would hear “Time for Supper” and have to go scurrying into the house. I could have sworn only a minute or two had passed since I’d had lunch and come outside to play. I vowed that I would have to learn how to control time better and try to figure out a way to make my faerie hunts last longer.
The problem was, I didn’t seem to have much control over my time shifting abilities. I could also expand time. This usually happened when I least wanted it to. For instance, spelling and arithmetic seemed to go on forever, not to mention the preacher’s sermons. Those hours seemed to stretch into many more minutes than the clock allowed. Sometimes it worked to my advantage though. Some of the best stretches of time were when my brother, Tom and I would go cloud watching. We had a favorite place to watch clouds. We would climb over the split rail fence that surrounded our neighbor’s pasture and lie down right in the middle of the field so that the tall grass stood over us. We had to pick a time when the cattle were grazing in the south pasture, so we’d have the field all to ourselves. Of course there had to be clouds in the sky, and it had to be warm enough outside to lie down on the ground. Finding a spot free of cow patties, we would lie down on our backs with our arms behind our heads and stare straight into the sky. Lying there, we could smell the sweet grassy smells, and maybe a whiff or two of cow pattie combined with the honesyckle vines that grew over the split rail fence - not an altogether unpleasant smell. When we were settled in and all was quiet, we could hear the buzzing of the bees, the rustling of the grasses and feel the warm sun on our faces. We would look straight up and watch to see if the clouds formed themselves into any recognizable shapes. As we lazily passed the long afternoon, my brother would point out cloud horses and cloud tanks and maybe an Indian or two, while I saw faerie castles and dragons. When the clouds passed overhead, you could feel the cooling on your skin and see the silvery gold haloes around the clouds. We decided that only the faeries could have hidden so much gold in clouds and that it must be the source for filling the pot at the end of a rainbow. Although we looked, we never did find where the rainbow ended.
When I started to school, my magical powers expanded. Sometimes, late at night or very early in the morning, I would look at my hands, or my knees or feet and they would seem to grow or shrink. Other times, my bed seemed to get very large and almost swallow me up, or get so small that I felt as if I would fall out. I felt like Alice in Wonderland going from very large to very small in the wink of an eye. Sometimes the feeling would last for hours and keep me clinging to the side of my bed until the feeling went away. Gradually I got used to the feeling and would get lost in watching everything shrink or grow. Other times, things would seem perfectly normal, and I never knew when the shrinking and growing would start again.
I would also experience the feeling when I was having my hair washed. Mom would roll up a towel for a pillow at the edge of the big kitchen sink, and I would climb onto the counter and lay on my back with my hair in the sink and my neck on the towel. Sometimes I would stand on a chair and bend over forward so that all my hair would hang down over my face and into the sink. The sink had a sprayer next to the faucet and mom would use it to wet my long hair while she put one hand over my eyes and scrub or spray with the other. It was during those times with my eyes closed that I would see images on the inside of my eyelids that seemed to grow and shrink as I squeezed my eyes shut tight to keep out the water and the shampoo. I once asked my mom about it and she said that I was squeezing my eyes shut too tight and that was making the blood rush into my face and causing me to think I was seeing things. Personally, I think it had something to do with a hair curse.
I had indeed been cursed with magical hair which grew faster than most peoples, was very thick, and was RED. No one else in the family had red hair. I don’t know who put the curse on me, but my mother would sometimes say I had hair like my grandmother, which was just plain silly since hers was white - so I guess she was cursed too. I didn’t much like getting my hair washed since it would be full of tangles afterward, and brushing them out would always hurt as mom tugged the comb through it. Sometimes she would make pincurls in my hair and push bobby pins through my hair so I would wake up the next morning with curls. I never liked to sit still long enough for her to pin my hair. It was that time stretching thing again that I seemed to have no control over. Most of the time the pins poked my head and I would pull them out in the middle of the night, and still my hair would not be dry in the morning. Most of the time, the only way to get my hair dry was to go outside in the sun and let it dry naturally, or put it into braids and wait for a couple of days. Letting it dry outside still took several hours and of course didn’t work in the winter.
My Granny finally told me that having a lot of thick hair was not really a curse, even though it might seem like it at the time. She said she believed that each hair represented a memory that led directly to my brain, and that the more hair I had, the more thoughts I would have, and the better my memory would be. I liked that idea and was finally happy I had such a lot of hair. She was pretty good at turning curses into blessings.
As I grew older, though, I lost some of my magical powers, although I maintained my belief in the possibility of it.
But ,this week my belief system is a bit strained. I watched a medical show on TV that told of a peculiar medical condition called “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome” that caused the sensation of things appearing first large and then small. The program chronicled a family whose multi-generational members all experienced this very real phenomenon and had volunteered to be research subjects. They had their brains mapped by researchers to try to document it. As I watched the show, I realized that this might have been what had caused my sensations when I was a child, and it was both a relief and a disappointment to learn that at least a portion of my powers were medical in nature.
However, I have not given up believing in magic altogether. I still get premonitions from time to time, and dream of faeries, and occasionally I can even stop time when I am hurrying to an appointment and still make it on time. I will have to ask my granddaughter if she sees things in the same way. She is 5, has beautiful long thick hair, and believes in faeries anyway, so even if she does have the condition, she and I will know that we haven’t lost all our powers at least. Besides, she has also made time stand still and stretches my enjoyment of the hours I am in her company. And she definitely is a fairy princess.
