“With only one twitch from her fingers, the fairy godmother turned the pumpkin into one of the most elegant carriages ever seen and the four little mice who had been feasting on its inside obediently took their place whilst being reshaped into draft horses.”
The last theatre play I worked on professionally, dealt with the horrible human rights violations and atrocities committed by Dutch soldiers during the struggle for independence of the former Dutch colony of Indonesia in the late 1940s. Quite a stretch from living a fairytale life in a fairytale house, no?
Every morning when I enter our gardens I can still sense the presence of all creatures great and small, doing what they like to do in the anonymity of the night just elapsed. It’s really not that hard to imagine that between all the common wild animals that belong here, hunting for food and other basic necessities, magical beings were rearranging our world into theirs and back again before dawn. Even during daytime, we are very aware that we’re never alone, sharing our domain with anything that rustles and hides.
For me however, the true fairytale of Les Pierres is how it has taught us resilience in dealing with reality. When for example our neighbours decided to unexpectedly construct a huge building next to our proud vegetable garden, it destroyed our view from many angles.
The old us would undoubtedly respond to a threat like that by immediately giving up, take our stuff and start anew somewhere else, away with the fairies. But Les Pierres’ enormous potential of happily ever after made us visualise the most beautiful greenhouse imaginable to cover up all disproportioned ugliness. Although its funding is still a long way off, that’s okay, we’ll get there.
Meanwhile, plenty of mice are more likely to find themselves in the clutches of our kitty cuties before they could even think about a career switch to the transportation industry. Our pumpkins will probably end up in soup or mash rather than to be inexplicably remodeled into a horse drawn landau. Their excess flowers, filled with cream cheese, make an excellent aperitif. Reality may not be magical at Les Pierres, we make sure it’s damn well tasty.
