Dear Reader:

I will remember the summer of 2016 as the summer of garden mysteries. The first mystery was waiting for my moon flowers to appear and bloom on my deck, only to discover (in August) that I was waiting, unknowingly, on beautiful hybrid blue morning glories to bloom. I was accidentally given the wrong tray and what a gorgeous solution to the mystery.

( These hybrids flowers I have re-named “Afternoon Glories.” They like to sleep in late….If I check on them around 9:00 a.m. they are all still sleeping and closed up. Around noon some of them begin opening and they hit their peak in early afternoon…they must be teenage glories.

Then yesterday came the biggest break-through in the disappearance of “Little Tinker Bell” the fairy….affectionately known as “Little Tink” to the garden fairy community. Her missing person status quo mystery was solved!!!

“Little Tink” was a gift from one of Anne’s sisters, who stopped by to visit the last time she and her husband were in town from Connecticut. We all had such a nice time getting to know each other.

I showed the couple around the garden and also pointed out the various fairies that co-inhabit it. Lucy was enchanted.

About a week later here came a little package with a tiny fairy in it. Lucy said she had her at home but realized she would be happier in my garden with more of her “own people” to play with every day.

I had a Disney, larger-sized Tinker Bell (with no wings) but who took Little Tink under her care and watched out for her. Wherever you saw one…you saw the other. Until one day I realized that I hadn’t seen Little Tink in awhile and I was trying to remember where she had been last placed in the garden. Big Tinker Bell was there but no sign of Little Tink.

Time went by and I told Eva Cate how sad I was that Little Tink seemed to have disappeared. She jumped right into the search committee mode to find her.Every time she would come to spend the night we spent at least a  half-hour to a hour searching for her everywhere.

“Keep looking Boo Boo she must be here somewhere.” After almost a year passed I gave up (secretly fearing that Lance, the weed-eater, had accidentally cut her up into pieces unknowingly.)

Instead it was actually Lance who found her yesterday. After he and Ernie left I was walking around the garden and got to the fairy bench when I noticed something looked different. One of the fairy statues was holding… Little Tink! I felt like a child again who had just found her favorite doll….how in the world did she reappear and where had she been?

I called Ernie (Lance was still luckily with him) to see where Lance had found this little fairy that Eva Cate and I had been looking for …for a year with no luck. Ernie conveyed my questions to Lance and he told me that he had picked up the fairy statue bench to get to some tall grass growing under it.

He was just getting ready to rev up the weed-eat again when the sun poked out for a moment and something half-buried under the area of the old placement of the leg of the bench, began to shine….it was Little Tink’s wings.

He bent down, picked her up, cleaned her off, and placed her on one of the fairy statues. It was there that I, later, discovered her.

I sent a photo to Mandy (on my Iphone) to show Eva Cate…I knew she would be thrilled! And she was!

I “hear-tell” that Big Tinker Bell put her on the basket of her bike and rode around the garden fairyland to let everyone know she was back…safe and sound.

*If I didn’t sleep last night it was probably due to all the fairy celebrating going on in the garden!

Sometimes we have to create our own magic and our own creative stories to excite little children and adults who still see life through the eyes of a child of wonder and curiosity.

I think I will tell Eva Cate that the “official” who found Little Tink thinks she accidentally fell off the bench during a thunder storm and got her wings caught up under the bench legs. She was pinned with no way to escape unless someone literally lifted the bench and moved it. It took a year for this to happen but Little Tink persevered and today she is a free fairy again. Moral: “Never Give Up!”

*Some side story arose during the disappearance of Little Tink.Some fairies thought they heard the fluttering of wings often during a quiet night. (In reality she was too small for her voice to be heard.) A mysterious tale spread throughout the fairy community that a winged ghost creature was haunting the garden…now the truth was known. It had been Little Tink, fighting for her freedom and life the whole time.

So until tomorrow….more mysteries will emerge before summer’s end I feel sure….stay tuned  for the next short short story in this collecton of magical moon gate mysteries.

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh