Why I no Longer Believe in Fairies(Rationality has a Price)

I am named after my great grandfather, my mother's, mother's, father. He was a traveling minister in the mountains where North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee all run together. My grandmother, as a preacher's daughter, received a better education than average and could play the piano and organ and had a lovely voice. She was in church, 'every time the door was open' as the saying went. My mom went to church regularly and I went till I was big enough to say no and make it stick. I was never impressed with religion as such but I did find the church building itself and some of the things never seen outside church very interesting.

I don't know about where you went to church, but at the church we attended, the Solid Rock Baptist Church,(which I always thought was a funny name for a cinderblock building with one of those long zigzag cracks down one side), there was no such thing as air conditioning. This was in the 50's of course, and churches in small cotton mill towns often didn't have air conditioning. They had high roofs and tall doors and windows that could be opened to admit any stray breeze. Since there was practically no traffic during church at that time and in that place leaving the doors open didn't cause a problem from traffic noise.

They also had fans, big cardboard fans on a wooden handle. The fan would have maybe a picture of Jesus holding a little boy and girl and sheep standing around and stuff like clouds in the background and the handle would have an ad for the local funeral home. They seemed to be the ones who provided fans to all the churches in town. The fans would be in the holders on the back of the pew in front of you along with the hymnals. I never did find out where people on the front row put their hymnals and fans.

I was always an observant and considering type, even when I was very young. I must have been about five when I decided that the reason the wind blew was because the leaves on the trees waved back and forth. Follow my reasoning here for a minute please. I lived on a farm with lots of big oak trees around, still do in fact. And I had made a connection between the shape of large oak leaves and the fans in church that we used on hot Sundays. Anyway, it made perfect sense to me when I was five. Big flat things wave back and forth and the air moves, ergo wind is caused by big flat things moving back and forth!

But, logically, and I was and am ever logical, there had to be something that moved the leaves back and forth, just like in church, someone had to take hold of the fan and move it. Enter fairies. I learned to read at an early age, can't really remember when I couldn't read in fact. I was reading a paper, one of the first things I'd discovered about papers was that they often had comics and what later came to be called an 'entertainment section'. I read a story about little people who lived in the forest and inhabited every tree and branch. This was an 'ah ha!' moment. Fairies, invisible fairies, it all made perfect sense.

Of course I had to come up with a new theory that fall when I noticed that even after all the leaves fell off the trees that the wind blew harder than ever.

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