by Charles Forsher
One day, while I was working for Mrs. Haydon on her end of Rustic Canyon Road, Pacific Palisades ranch in Southern California, I was asked to give a boy and girl, children of some visiting guests, a tour of the ranch. By this time I had become quite familiar with the ranch and was happy to oblige.
The first stop in my tour was the small square cement pond behind the Haydon's house. It was a few feet high, about five feet in width by four feet. A small amount of water from a garden waterfall above it frequently cascaded down into the pool keeping it filled with just the right amount of water for the frogs that assembled here at night who would spend the night singing praises to the Creator, exactly what the stucco covered box was designed for.
The small pool was usually empty this time of day, but when I arrived this day, there was a marvelous bullfrog resting on one of the loose bricks placed in the pool for such a purpose.
"This, " I thought "would make explaining the pool much easier". I bent over, reached down, and gently picked up the bullfrog. The children, who were seven and eight years old, were delighted as I started the narration.
Then the bullfrog screamed - it let out a short, shrill, piercing scream.
The children’s mouths dropped open, and their eyes became as big as organ stops.
I was speechless as well. A scream implied vocal cords. Frogs are not supposed to have vocal cords. I half expected the bullfrog to raise up on his legs, producing a
small top hat and cane and break into a chorus of:
‘Hello my honey, hello my sweetheart, hello my rag time gal.’Like the singing bullfrog seen in an animated cartoon series aired on television about this time in Los Angeles. However the bullfrog just sat there complacently, just as in the other parts of the cartoon where it does that, foiling its victim.
‘Send me a letter by wire, honey set my heart on fire-‘
“It must be a fairy in disguise.” I said as I gently put the bullfrog back on his loose brick perch, and led the children away to continue my tour.
Why this happened can be traced to a prayer a month prior.
I had become interested in the idea of Fairies. If there can be angels, I thought, then there must also be Fairies, just like there are levels of life in the sea.
Maybe my thoughts were coming from another source. The Haydons had bought land nobody else wanted. Actor and commentator, Will Rogers, had lived up the hill, what was now Will Rogers State Park, and the Haydon's Ranch was where Will Rogers kept hundreds of horses, for several decades. Nobody wanted the property.
The Haydons used the tons of horse manure to create an Eden like garden.
This in turn attracted the Fairies.
I guess after I had been working for the Haydons for over a year my inclination towards being a Medium alerted me to the Fairies' presence.
One night I had a vivid dream. I was walking between a cabin, which was one of Mr. Haydon's studies (and where I lived) and the main house. As I passed under a big tree, looking up where the white rooster liked to sleep at night, I saw a Leprechaun sitting on a thick overhanging branch. His black clothes were wrinkled, and his stovepipe hat was a little bent. He was smoking a tiny clay pipe. My own experience with a Wonderland Caterpillar?
I was dreaming, but still, this was an unusual dream. The Leprechaun's face was clearly Irish, even with the thin beard. I kept walking, and as I got near to the main house I woke up.
Later that morning, while working in the garden, I looked up and over at the big tree I had walked under in my vivid dream, and then it all came back.
I stopped, closed my eyes, and audibly as well as reverently offered a prayer; not as prayers are commonly thought of. To pray, I had found out by research, meant to speak sincerely.
The Gospel teacher hinted that every word his students spoke was to be a prayer, that normal dialogue was an invitation to evil, and for centuries afterwards, the sincerity associated with prayer was voiced in the statement, ‘speak, I pray thee.’ In this spirit I audibly and reverently thanked the Fairies for the vision, but explained that I needed to see some proof of their existence in the physical world---the one I lived in, and what better place than in the great garden the Haydons had created.
Then, as the late Carl Jung might have said about such things, I forgot entirely about the matter to let nature take its course.
A few weeks later, Mrs. Haydon came to me with a project. The big cement pond in front of her house, the one that really looked like a pond, had been attacked by the trees surrounding it and needed to be drained so that the cracks created by all of those trees could be repaired.
My job was two-fold. I had to corral the goldfish, transport them back to the square pool in back of the house, and then drain the pond.
The first part of this was fairly easy. Fruit from a nectar tree growing near the pond kept dropping in, fermenting the pond water and making the goldfish, well, drunk. I made sure I included ample amounts of fermented water with the transport so that the goldfish would not be traumatized.
Then, the hard part of the project was tackled. I was told by Mrs. Haydon not to spill one drop; not to splash. The fermented water after all.
The artificial pond had a place where anybody could sit, a special depressed place designed for family members and guests to sit in on hot California Augusts, where water would be up to one’s shoulders and the goldfish would lazily swim by.
I got permission to use a garden hose to create a siphon, and once I had suction, placed it at the bottom of the sitting place, the other end of the garden hose yards away and down hill near a horse coral. All that I had to do for the next few hours was monitor the draining process. It went smoothly enough, including the removal of the barrier I had set up when corralling the drunk goldfish.
Finally, in the late afternoon, there was nothing more I could with a siphon, and the rest had to be scooped out by hand, using a bucket to put this in, and finally I got hold of some large rags. Each filled bucket was carefully carried away from the cement pond and down to the same place the water had drained out of the long garden hose.
Near sunset that day, I thought I saw a jewel lodged in a unusual kind of palm tree the Haydons had planted in the small island, in the middle of their pond, protected by the same concrete surface that had been cracking due to tree roots.
“Oh-oh!”
The prayer request I had made weeks ago came rushing back. I had asked to see physical proof of the existence of garden fairies, and they had met my request with what looked like a very expensive gift.
I waited until the large rags and the process of evaporation had the entire pond area dry as a bone. Now it was myself who was wet. Mostly from working up a good body sweat while walking up and down the long steep driveway in warm weather. I climbed back into the empty pond and literally crawled over to the island, and then, using the strange palm tree the jewel was lodged in lifted myself up to the level that the jewel was resting in.
There was a mixture of relief and disappointment. No, it was not really a large jewel. The relief was the near-paranoia that would have come over me next, worrying about what to do with it; the Fairies essentially saving me from myself.
Then bemusement. Despite the fact I had not spilled one drop of pond water as Mrs. Haydon had instructed me, here was a tiny drop of pond water nearly six feet off the ground, AND sitting in a leaf with a serrated edge, just as a real jewel might be held in place on a ring by a silver construct with a serrated edge, AND resting at just the right angle to catch the setting sun, causing the jewel like effect.
“A JEWEL FOR YOUR MEMORY” came a very loud thought.
But then, perhaps it was not a thought at all, but one of the Fairies using Clairaudience.
I turned around and sat down, weary but happy. My prayer had been answered. I would always have this moment; this jewel in my memory, and this also confirmed my earlier notions about Fairies as part of a Divine Order.
At the top of this, as expressed in the book of Genesis, God (as a plural - Elohim) creates heaven and earth, and later man and women in their image, after their likeness. How easy it would have been for the wee ones to ‘copy and paste’ a drop of pond water up on to that leaf.
Even now, years later, I am still moved by the fact that I was answered at all, surely a manifestation of Divine Love.
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