Cousins

Did you know, little one, that in the bright cusp of summer, when the sun was low but the grass still warm, your mother communed with fairies?

She drank tea from snapdragon cups while the fairies spun her hair into a gold plaited crown before she sat on her ivy throne and held court with the snails and ladybugs.

Your mother whispered to the butterflies, so the fairies turned her eyes into stars and her lips into the moon — because only the night sky can tell secrets to the insects that sleep on roses.

And dear one, on slow August nights when the wind slips across your skin like thick velvet and the sun is yawning low in the sky, you can still hear the song she taught the crickets.