flax-golden

five easy steps

Fantastical Expeditions in Five (Comparatively) Easy Steps

1. Draw a ship. It is wise to add sails or oars for ease of travel.
2. Pack for your journey. Be sure to bring extra shoes, a towel, a lucky penny, and a journal to record your adventures.
3. Believe your ship is real.*
4. Climb aboard, very carefully.
5. Politely tell the ship to go wherever it wants to go.

*This is the most difficult step. Practice is recommended.

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

the yarn merchant

She spins her yarns from dreams and hopes and forgotten wishes on a wheel made of alder wood and dragon bone. She sells them every third Saturday at the market, unless there is no moon. Prices vary by color and content and valor of customer.

The yarns made with nightmares cost extra. Nightmare yarn is volatile and must be handled with great care.

If you are not worthy of her yarn she will turn you away, regardless of what you are willing to pay. She will appraise you in a single glance and there is no arguing with her once you have been dismissed with a wave of a many-ringed, wrinkled hand.

There are other places to purchase yarn at the market, and they have fine yarns, but nothing to compare with these.

Oh, the things that can be knit with these yarns! Provided you have proper needles.

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

buoyant solidarity

I like to let my balloons go. Release the string and let them fly.

They clearly want to fly.

I know, it’s bad for the environment. They likely end up broken and sad, tangled in trees.

But I hope that they don’t.

I hope they fly towards each other. Lost balloons and released balloons and rogue balloons, all finding kindred souls on untied strings.

I like to think somewhere they cling together, in a kind of buoyant solidarity.

Tangled bits of rainbow on blue sky.

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

the magic business

My father says the secret is making the audience think there’s a trick when there isn’t, really.

The magic business is all about misdirection and flashy handkerchiefs and sparks because real magic is boring if you let people see it without all the flashy stuff over top. People pay for tickets to see the spectacle, not the magic.

You have to make it look difficult, because if it looks too easy the audience thinks anyone can do it and then it’s not special and ticket-worthy.

But never be too good, he says. People don’t like it when you’re too good.

It’s harder than it sounds, to be good enough to be impressive but not good enough to be unbelievable.

Especially when it’s so easy. It’s like trying to make tying your shoes look mystifying.

Maybe it is, to people who don’t have shoes.

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

simple as kisses

People say he used to be a prince. Probably because it seems appropriate and romantic, traditional for tales about frogs.

Neighborhood girls dare each other to creep through the brush into the yard, to tangle the ropes of his swing or kiss the top of his green, frozen head. They run off in screaming giggles, leaving him alone with his sorrow and no way to right himself.

The rules are not as simple as kisses, not these days.

He is part of neighborhood folklore now, the Prince on his swing. One Hallowe’en someone placed a paper crown on his head but it would not stay, carried off in a rush of midnight leaves by a cold November wind.

But he was never a prince. Just a boy. A stupid, stupid boy.

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