erin's emporium of discount dreams & well-worn wonders

a saturday afternoon quest for power

It’s a stupid thing to search for, she tells me, for about the hundredth time since we started walking.

I ask her if it would be better to search for Knowledge and she says that it would.

Well, Knowledge is Power, isn’t it? I ask, and that shuts her up for a good half an hour but after we find the next marker (a rock this time, engraved instead of painted and half-hidden in the grass) she starts up again.

How do you know you’ll get to keep it if you find it? she asks.

I’m not sure but I don’t tell her that.

We’ll figure that out when we reach it, I say.

Then she asks if we have a big enough bag if we need to bring it home and I worry that I haven’t thought this through properly.

I suggest that she look for shapes in the clouds, distracting her while I search for the next sign with another arrow to point the way.

She finds a pirate ship and a dancing bear.

I start to wonder what it is I’m looking for.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

accidental poetry

It’s the easiest way to compose a poem, he tells me.

I don’t believe him, but I nod in what I hope is a thoughtful-looking way as he throws the letters up into the air. I make a silent mental note that he used the word compose and not write.

We both watch as the letters cascade to the ground in random patterns: a W overlapping an R, a zig-zag that could be a Z or a sideways N.

An O joins an M for a momentary meditation before they separate again.

Once the letters settle they’re all nonsense and I can’t find any proper words.

I try to tell him that I’m still not sure I understand how it’s supposed to work but he shushes me, already scribbling in his notebook.

I stare at the pile of letters, searching for words though there aren’t nearly enough vowels.

There’s a B next to an R with a Y that reminds me of a girl I once knew named Briony who laced her shoes backwards with the bows near the toes.

And now I think I get it.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

the storied pasts of carousel ponies

Once they were real ponies, because that’s how such stories go.

(Before that they were real boys, of course. Princes and paupers and a solitary thief, each with their own individual pre-pony story.)

It was a curse of some sort, though none of them would tell the same tale now were they able to speak of it. They were frozen mid-gallop and later, much later, there was music and lights and the delighted laughs and squeals of children.

It wasn’t so bad, as curses go.

Quite a few of them found it rather fun, unless the children kicked too hard. And even the grumpiest pony agreed that the feel of wind as they spun was decadent and wild, reminiscent of the real-pony days.

But the spinning and the lights and the music all ceased long ago, replaced by stillness and slowly fading paint.

Sometimes they hum tunes from various past lives softly to themselves as they wait for their next story.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

visualization tools for dreamtime adventures

I’m not that good at visualizing.

I practiced constantly but I only managed to master everyday objects. Apples, pens, coffee cups. Not particularly inspiring dream fodder.

No matter how I tried I couldn’t capture anything fantastical that didn’t feel fragile and thin and fleeting. But I knew I must be doing something right, what with the crispness of the dream-apples and the perfect level of sweetness in my dream coffee.

So I found more adventurous objects to fill my everydays, though it required creative shopping.

I found the ship in an antique shop.

I studied the masts and the rigging and the curve of the bow, slowly learning every detail.

Now I can sail the seas in my dreams.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

the short yet joyful lives of soap bubbles

The first to arrive is confused but only for a moment before a companion appears.

Look! the first bubble says to the second, and as more bubbles join them the word is repeated and echoed by bubble after bubble. Look, look!

They tumble upward and dance on breezes, giddily spinning as they stare at the strange new world they have been blown into.

Look! they say to their fellow bubbles, sometimes so enthusiastically that they bump into each other and cling and spin together.

They peer in windows and exclaim at the contents.

They ask questions about how and why but the answers seem unimportant.

People smile at them and they smile in return, giddy for having made people smile by simply existing.

When some bubbles begin to pop, the others gasp and sigh and rush to share their thoughts and observations with their remaining friends.

And when only a solitary bubble is left with no one else to talk to it looks around and around at the sky and the ground and everything in between in blissful silence until it too explodes with joy.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

always darjeeling

It’s not that good a trick, really.

There are ooohs and aaahhs when I show someone who hasn’t seen it before, but only the first time.

After the second time they complain that I can’t do it with anything else.

Like it’s not that impressive to draw something in chalk and have it become real once the drawing is complete since I can only do it with teacups.

Even though the teacups materialize with actual tea inside.

But the tea will only be hot if I draw the steam, and I have to draw lots of it in order to obtain proper tea-drinking temperature.

I usually don’t drink it, anyway.

It’s never sweetened, even if I draw sugar cubes.

And it’s always Darjeeling.

No matter how much I wish for Earl Grey.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

an impromptu ceremony to restore the sun

We were sick of the winter and we wanted to get the sun back.

We yelled for it but it couldn’t hear us.

We thought maybe it would be able to see us through the clouds if everything wasn’t so grey so we got a lot of paint.  We argued about colors the sun would like but we settled on the brightest, warmest ones that looked summer-hot and sunshine-y.

We put all the bright warm colors in buckets and dragged the buckets out to the backyard. We had to take each color bucket one at a time because they were heavy and we both agreed that the yellows were the heaviest but we couldn’t figure out why.

We painted the house and the trees and the dry grass. We dipped our feet in the heavy yellows and our braids in orange and peach and mango and when we were all covered in sunshine colors we did a sunshine dance and tried to get the cat to dance with us and he didn’t want to but we got him nice and sunshine-y, too.

After the dancing we were tired and it was nighttime and the sun probably couldn’t see us anymore even through the clouds so we went to bed.

In the morning the sun was out and all the paint was gone.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

ghosts in the park

There are ghosts in the park but no one else seems to be able to see them.

When I told my mom she said “of course there are, dear” but she wasn’t looking right at the ghost lady even though I pointed.

I tested her, too. I said “isn’t her hat nice and floppy for the sunshine?” and my mom said “yes it is, she must be a sensible ghost to have a hat like that” and then I knew she couldn’t see the ghost lady because the ghost lady wasn’t wearing a hat.

The hatless ghost lady smiled at me but she didn’t say anything.

The next day there were two ghost ladies sitting on the bench but all they did was talk about the weather and politics and shoes. Neither of them had hats.

Now there’s always at least two or three park ghosts. The most I’ve seen at once is five and that day I had to yell at a bunch of kids who tried to sit on the ghost bench and my mom got mad and told the kids and a mom and two dads that I have an overactive imagination.

But the ghosts all said thank you.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

springtime wisdom imparted by flirtatious rabbits

On sunny days in the spring I like to sit out in the field, usually with a book and a green tea lemonade. Sometimes the rabbits come very close like they want to see what I’m reading but this was the first time one of them actually struck up a conversation.

There were some almost-awkward pauses and a few clumsy remarks about the weather and he seemed like he might bolt back across the field at any moment, but eventually he settled down for a good long chat.

He mentioned that he doesn’t like carrots, which I found surprising but he called it a cartoon-propagated rabbit stereotype.

He nibbled clover while I sipped my green tea lemonade.

We talked about life and about change. About heartbreaks and choices and difficulties, spring-blooming, equinox rebirth and new possibilities.

He told me that he prefers to hop higher when the ground gets difficult to walk on. His tone suggested this was something of a metaphor.

In that mid-air moment, he said, it feels like flying.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

monitoring system

We were on the waiting list for almost six months before we got our new apartment. The realtor kept talking about the list as a positive, like the building is superior because it has a list.

It could be that it’s small or that people ask to live here for the sake of being on a waiting list, as though a building you can waltz right into simply isn’t as cool.

The building is actually quite cool, though, with lots of brick and odd corners. The kind of building you’d be wary of playing hide-and-seek in because you might never be found.

Technically I don’t think I was supposed to be in the fenced-off part near the back gardens where I found the tangle of pipes and meters that would have been practically invisible against the brick in the shadows but I happened to be there when the sun was falling just right to see them clearly.

At first I thought it was some sort of plumbing or heating thing, the meters were labeled so I found the one for our apartment and the display said Moderate Contentment – Acclimating with the little arrow pointing towards the top.

I checked a few of the others and they said things like Mild Annoyance – Passing and High Contentment – Maintaining.

I asked the building manager about them and he called it a “Monitoring System.”

He just smiled at me when I asked if he ever needs to make adjustments.

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.