Seven Years Later

Seven Years Later

Adam had become cynical, stoic and heard of heart when it came to ideas of little people running amok in the forests of the great trees to the North. He had foggy flashes of memories about hiking with his grandparents who took on the task of raising him after losing his birth parents in a house fire at just two years of age. Jenelle and Pete were always a little strange in Adam's eyes. They had lots of figurines of gnomes and faeries in the yard and house as well, and books, yes books with unfathomable tales of Sylphs, Undines and Gnomes and in his youth Adam read them all and marveled at them and the images within!

But the world had gobbled up Adam's fanciful spirit by the time he was 15 because of sports and girls and all of the other woes that steal our youth. So Adam left home after high school in hopes of landing a degree in economics which was probably the most grounded field anyone could pursue. He traveled the 300 miles to visit his grandparents several times during his first year in college. In his second year Grandpa Pete had succumbed to a critical stroke, so he packed up and drove up for the funeral which was bitter sweet since he would never again speak to him, yet his grandmother Jenelle didn't seem very sad and whispered to Adam that "grandpa is with them now!" "With whom?" (queried Adam). "With the little people, and soon, I will join him and them in the Heavenly meadows of Eden!"

In his final year of school grandma Jenelle passed from an awful pneumonia, so Adam went home to settle their affairs. All of the books and figurines went to a storage unit along with a few other meaningful items as well, but the rest was sold to pay for expenses. Adam earned his degree and got a job as an economics professor at Cascada University where he worked for seven years, but an odd thing happened during the following summer vacation. Adam received a tiny box, the return address, claiming to be from grandma Jenelle ... but the house was sold some six years ago and grandma had passed away some seven now. So Adam shrugged his head and pried open the box. Inside was a letter and a thumb drive. The letter read, "Adam, I know you weren't expecting to hear from me, but I need for you to download this music onto your android and head up to Hapness Falls where we used to hike to, sit still and listen to the music, but only in the woods! Please do this for me, Love Grandma!"

So Adam did just that. There was a very tranquil breeze that enveloped his head and body on that early day in September. He put his earbuds in and pushed play. There was the sound of what seemed like chipmunks whispering, then a harp like melody with a distant flute playing. That music seemed to put Adam into some sort of trance and suddenly, he found himself surrounded by ... yes, the LITTLE FOLK! It was quite an experience which jogged his memory all the way back to when he was three years old ... when he saw them for the very first time! He tried to remember every detail of his new adventure ... the faeries hopping around on his arms giggling and whispering "we remember you!" The rest of his adventure is a story all its own. So now that Adam's inner child had been reawakened, He pulled all of the books out of storage and read them all with his new point of view. He went on to write his own book about the little people which became a huge best seller as did several books written afterward and he made a much greater living than he ever could as a professor! Besides that his books encouraged children to believe in things they may never see!

The moral here is; greater rewards come from fostering what we treasured as wee children!