When the hollyhocks come alive and bloom in the summer, this is what you do with them . . . you make the perfect gift
Long, long ago, on a hot, muggy afternoon in July when I was four years old, Grandma took me to the back of her house where the hollyhocks grew. Stalks that must have been as tall as my grandfather waved in the slight breeze, and the pink, white, and yellow flowers danced in the sun. The life that seemed to be within them mesmerized me.
Back in those days when everyone and everything in this world was so tall and new to me, the hollyhocks were alive. They whispered to me, and although I couldn’t make out their message, I listened with my ears and my eyes, open to catching a word, a note, a nod meant just for me. I looked for the fairies among them. I hoped they lived there.
“Watch, little Wren,” Grandma said to me.
She picked a light pink flower from one of the stalks. Then she chose another flower — one that hadn’t opened yet. A bud. I watched, captivated, as she plucked the tiny green leaves from it.
She bent down to my height and showed me what was left of the naked bud. Five little “eyes” caught me in their sight, and the pink petals that were left in waiting, ready to bloom, sat atop that undressed petite bud.
The bud was coming to life. I’m sure it would soon be able to tell me fairy tales and sing me to sleep with lullabies, and maybe — just maybe — it would tell me where the other fairies lived.
Grandma turned the pink flower upside down and slipped the bud onto the stem of the full bloom. It fit snugly, as if it had always been there.
“We used to make these dolls,” she said, “when I was a little girl on the farm in Iowa.”
Grandma had been a young girl like me? If she said it, then it must be true.
She handed the hollyhock doll to me, and I could hardly believe I held a fairy in my hand — a real fairy — and they had been in front of me all along, living in the flowers. They were the flowers.
I skipped around the yard with my personal fairy, played with her all afternoon, carried her around with me all that night, even though she was long wilted by then. And although my four-year-old eyes saw how lifeless she had become, I still felt the magic in her. And that’s what I hold onto to this day…the magic and the secrets that we have to look a little harder for. We only need to don our enchanted spectacles and be open to being charmed and captivated by the delights all around us, in plain sight.
It’s dreamlike and mysterious and wonderful and lovely
how we humans can create something from nature,
how it’s our nature to create,
and how we can transform the simple into the sacred and revered.
There’s where our power and our magic dwells.
I never got over it.
Not to this day.
And if things go right, I never will.
Want to know how to make a hollyhock doll? Here’s a video.
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