I am drinking white berry blossom tea and it's making me feel worlds better. I always knew those fairies had something right. :)

It tastes like flowers. The smell/taste reminds me of when I was in elementary school and used to open the flowers of the catalpa that fell on the ground and taste the nectar, pretending I was a fairy and the nectar was my drink.

Playing fairy games was one of my favorite pastimes. I still remember sitting to the side of the playground on the yellow-green grass by that bush or a tree and making mud-grass pies and leaf boats. I can almost remember the smell of that bush.

I've always wondered what it was. It was huge--I called it a bush-tree because it was so tall. It grew red berries in a funny oblong shape. We would peel at them and cut them into pieces with our fingernails. We never ate them, but we pretended they were food for the fairies...

I used to draw in the dirt with sticks, daydreaming. Boy, I was a daydreamer. I could get lost in my thoughts for hours.

I'm almost done with my berry blossom tea. It's terrible--I feel as if I'm leaving behind the last traces of my childhood. I'll probably have to keep the package. Maybe berry blossom will become my standard tea...

~*~

I invented a group of flower fairies and wrote stories about them. Their names were Marigold, Blossom, Ivy, Rose and Bluebell. I had to have as many colors of the rainbow as possible, of course. :) Later I added Snowdrop and Tiger Lily to my stories, but not to my drawings.

I used the old Crayola Bold markers to color them, plus some of the regular colors, and made each of them different. Blossom had black curly hair, a royal purple skirt, and cerulean flowers in her hair. Ivy had a green skirt and straight brown hair and marigold-colored flowers in her hair. Marigold had curly marigold-colored hair... I don't remember what color her skirt or flowers were. Rose had a raspberry-colored skirt and straight blonde hair, and maybe fuchsia-colored flowers. Bluebell had a cerulean skirt, royal-purple flowers and curly blonde hair.

The old bold colors gave way to the new bold colors and childhood gave way to womanhood. When I was about 18, I found a set of the old colors in a store once and was overjoyed. Bought it at once--wrote "NO TOUCHY" in black permanent marker on the front. The back of the box said the colors were from 1995! I held on to them for as long as I could. I still have the box, but the markers deteriorated from lack of use. Marigold went first, then fuschia and jungle green. I was devastated when raspberry dried out; it was always my favorite color of the bunch. Royal purple still lives on, but I think cerulean's usefulness ended as well.

Rose was my favorite flower-fairy because of her raspberry-colored skirt, and her blonde hair looked beautiful with the red. But I always had kind of a love-hate relationship with her because she was blonde. According to what I read and heard and saw, boys only liked blondes, and since I was not blonde, I was apparently out of luck. Ivy, my brown, straight-haired fairy was the one I related to the most. She was content to be quiet and not stand out much, unlike Rose. She didn't struggle with self-esteem issues like I did and didn't ever feel obligated to please people, especially not the Rose characters in the world. :) She was kind of an idealized version of me.

Blossom was the one I felt the most admiration for. I loved her purple skirt and blue flowers and black, curly hair. Blue, purple and green were always the most beautiful color combination to me, and the black dramatized it delightfully. She seemed exotic to me.

Bluebell was almost more beautiful than Rose. She had blonde hair like Rose, but was more old-fashioned than Rose was, preferring peaceful blue to loud red and romantic curls instead of sleek, straight hair. She was the peacemaker of the bunch. Rose and Ivy argued a lot and Bluebell would always intervene and turn the girls to a more common sensical approach to everything.

Marigold never developed much of a personality, sadly, despite being the inspiration to the whole world I created. I suppose I always thought of her as younger than the others, more naive and less connected with the "real world." Perhaps she represented the dreams that led to the stories. She was beautiful too, nonetheless, in her own childlike way: I always thought of her hair as the most vibrant--not quite red, not quite gold, but some shimmering combination of the two. It was the thing that defined her.

The fact that my hair has taken on a red-gold sheen in my later years may just be the dreamy part of me shining out. :) You see Stephanie--and you think to yourself, "Now, there's a practical girl. Glasses instead of contacts. Not a lot of makeup. Low-maintenance haircut. Clothes unremarkable colors, more aimed at comfort than fashion." At first glance you think to yourself, "Her hair is just an ordinary brown; that fits with the rest of her appearance." And then my hair catches the sunlight and you start seeing so many other colors brought in it. And you think, "What is that all about? Where did that come from? That doesn't fit at all. Perhaps there's more to her than I thought."

And I think to myself... "Perhaps there is." :)

-Stephanie

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