WHEN I DISCOVERED THE CLEARING in the woods, my first thought was that elves had made it, even though I was far too old to believe in such things.
The clearing held a log laid out like a table, replete with crude wooden dishes and cutlery and four Lilliputian chairs. Long ago, someone had even made an effort to weave a ceiling overhead from interlocking branches, though now the detritus of a dozen or more autumns coated everything.
I discovered the clearing quite by accident. While exploring a dense snarl of thicket, in the forest surrounding my Grandmother’s house, I discovered an intricate symbol scarred into a tree—a swirling pattern that looked like a Celtic knot. Or a maze.
Looking around, I soon found another symbol carved into a different tree. Then another. And another. Following the breadcrumb trail eventually led me to the clearing—a small natural hollow, tucked between five large elms and banked on two sides by steep hills.
I had stumbled into someone’s Fortress of Solitude.
Each fork, knife, and spoon looked like it had been painstakingly whittled. Some were carved of light wood, others dark. Some were long, others stout. One spoon was barely more than a shallow circular depression—its handle had broken off. Though nothing matched, every piece of cutlery bore the scars of a pocket knife and looked to be in bad need of a sanding.
The plates and bowls, while better crafted, were filled with rainwater and moss now grew along their edges. As I watched, beetles dove in and out of the water, fishing for leaves perhaps, or drowning aphids.
The chairs were the crudest thing in the clearing—simple pieces of hewn wood, nailed together for support. One of the four chairs was ant-infested, another had almost rotted away, and no chair sat level on the ground.
The table in the clearing’s centre was a simple wooden stump. I could see the remnants of a rotting tablecloth on the forest floor around the stump, and the wood itself was now riddled with labyrinthine worm-holes. The tree that once stood here had been huge—over a metre in diameter.
The entire scene looked like a tea party, laid out and then forgotten—but not a tea party meant for me. The size of everything, save the stump, was elfin. As if for children.
For some reason, I began to clean the clearing. I cleared the hollow of the largest deadfall. I swept the floor of most of its dead leaves. I dumped the water from the bowls, sending the beetles spilling into the musty earth.
When the sun began to set, I returned to my Grandmother’s house for proper tools: nails, hammer, hacksaw, sandpaper, and anything else that might be useful in restoring the weather-beaten furniture.
My Grandmother caught me as I crossed the lawn. “Well you’re a little busy bee,” she said. “Where are you off to at this hour?”
I spilled the secret of the elfin sanctuary and my impromptu restoration project.
“Show me,” she said, but then set off purposely across the grass, leaving me to catch up.
My Grandmother laughed when I pointed out the first marked tree. She ran her wrinkled fingers over the marred bark. She placed a hand on each of the labeled trees that followed, as if memorizing the path by touch.
When we came to the clearing, my Grandmother laughed like a child and picked up each plate and fork in turn, running a critical eye over their construction. Finally, she turned to me and I saw that she was crying.
“This was mine,” she whispered, looking down fondly at the worm-scarred wood. “My hideaway, back when I was little. A girl with six brothers needs an escape. I built it all, with the tools my mother let me steal from the shed, while my father was at work.”
My Grandmother took one of the hammers I’d lugged along and stuck four iron nails between her teeth. “Come on,” she said around the metal. “We’ve got work to do.”
Night fell while we worked. She went back to the house once to grab lanterns and flashlights. Then we toiled away in a small bubble of light, while crickets chirped around us and mosquitoes buzzed by our ears.
We pried apart the chairs and rebuilt them from newer, sturdier wood. We sanded down what cutlery we could and re-carved others from the young twigs. My Grandmother even showed me metal hooks stuck into the surrounding elms, where she used to hang a tarp for shelter.
“I used to suspend my flashlight from the tree branches,” she laughed. “A pretty silver thing. This whole space would light up like a proper fort.”
We returned to my Grandmother’s house shortly before daybreak. I chattered happily about our midnight shop class assignment during the walk back, while my Grandmother sagged with sleep against my arm. Yet, despite the love we’d put into our little restoration project and our smiles over pancakes the next morning, I never did go back to see it during the day.