When our daughter, Lily, was little I left notes for her from the daoine sídhe, the small people, the people of peace, the hidden people, the people of the thickets. I left those notes everywhere on the path up to our house, on exposed rocks, gummed to the trunks of trees with sap, slipped into the clefts of bark, folded into the quadrants of the fence. The daoine sídhe are not easily seen but they are there in the bushes, in the mounds and hillocks of fields, flitting among the trees, smiling in the web and braid of branches. The notes were written on the shells and hulls of nuts and the flanks of leaves and the smooth bark of white walnut twigs. The daoine sídhe acknowledge that the world does not believe they are alive and well and adamant and elusive and interested in the doings of all beings of every sort and shape. I would try to leave a note every other day at least, and whenever I had to travel and miss a day or two of notes I felt a sag in my heart at the thought of our small Lily searching the porch and the fence and the walnut tree for notes and finding no notes and thinking perhaps the daoine sídhe were no longer her close and particular friends. There are many theories as to who the daoine sídhe are and one theory is that once they knew larger stronger crueler people were inarguably taking from them the places they loved they retreated to the shadows and the hidden places, under the ground and into the thickets, into all the half-seen half-noticed places all around us no matter where we live. We see so little. I would scrawl the notes with my left hand so that my handwriting could not be recognized and I was careful never to use a pen that she knew to be her father’s pen. I learned not to leave notes from the daoine sídhe exposed to the rain because then the message would be washed away leaving nothing but hints and intimations. Sometimes I would leave a message without words. Another theory of the daoine sídhe is that they are supernatural beings but I do not think this is so. I think they are as natural and organic and present as you and me. I think that mostly what people think is supernatural isn’t. I think there is much more going on than we are aware of and sensitive to and perceptive about, and the more we think we know what is possible and impossible the more we are foolish and arrogant and imprisoning ourselves in an idea. I think language is an attempt to drape words on things we sense but do not understand, like grace and the daoine sídhe. It is easy to say that the small people, the people of peace, the hidden people, do not exist, but you do not know that is so and neither do I, and Lily used to write back to the daoine sídhe on the shells and hulls of nuts and the flanks of leaves and the nubs of cedar cones and on chips of bark, and I kept every such note she ever wrote.
There came a time when I stopped writing the notes, because that time comes, and Lily stopped writing back, because that time comes, but there was a time when the daoine sídhe wrote to her, and she would rise from her bed, and run outside, and search the porch and the fence and the walnut tree for notes, and until the day I die I will remember the headlong eager way she ran, thrilled and anticipatory and delighted, with a warm secret in her face, because the people of peace were her friends, and wrote her name on the skins of this world, and left her little gifts and presents, and asked her questions about her people and her dreams, and the bushes and hedges and thickets and branches for her were alive with mystery and affection. And to those who would say I misled our daughter, I filled her head with airy nonsense, I soaked her in useless legend and fable and myth, I lied to her about what is present and absent in the world, I would answer, And how do you know what is possible and impossible in this world of wonders beyond our ken? Are you really so sure there is not far more than you can see, living in the half-seen half-noticed places all around us? And how is it a bad thing to fill a child’s heart with joy for any reason whatsoever, on any excuse whatsoever, for as long as howsoever possible, before the world builds fences and walls around her thrilled and fervid imagination, how is that a bad thing at all?