Wee Folk at Our Homestead

by S ◊ 

Our family owned an old clapboard farmhouse on the top of a mountain in rural New Hampshire. My grandfather’s mother had bought it as a summer place, and even when she bought it one hundred years ago, it was little more than an abandoned, run-down shack. There was no electricity, no running water, and there was a cow living in the kitchen rather than in the barn. The hundred and fifty acres of land that came with the house was almost as neglected. The fortunate part of this is that the hills, forests, rocks, streams, and the trees on the land remained the perfect home for the spirits that lived there.

Sunset in New England, by Ross Turner, 19th century. Public domain.

After our father, George, moved into the house, my brothers and I went to live with him. He took us up to an old cellar hole at the top of the pasture. I could sense the presence of the wee folk there, and George suggested that we do something nice for the creatures. In those days, we nearly always had single-malt scotch in the house. We went down to the house and fetched the bottle and some antique glasses and returned to the cellar hole. We poured out a small measure of scotch into the cups and left them on the ground. We sat and waited for the wee folk to appear, and although it took a while, they couldn’t resist the scotch and they climbed up the rocks to get it. At the time, I didn’t think about the fact that they don’t like man-made objects such as glass, but since then I realized that it’s best to give them the scotch in small cups made out of wood or stone, and to wear gloves (but not plastic gloves, since the plastic smells bad) when I put out whiskey. The wee folk don’t like the smell of man.

When my brothers and I lived at the house, we spent a good deal of time wandering around in the woods. George took us to visit the spirits there. One day I happened to pick up a rock as we walked along the over-grown wood road, and immediately the rock told me that it did not want to be picked up. I put it down. As I walked on a few feet to catch up with George and my brothers, I heard the rock tell me that it wished to go back to where it had been, not where I had put it. So I turned back, fetched the rock, and found the spot that I had picked it up from. When I replaced it, it stopped complaining. I learned that day that not only are there faeries living in the rock walls and among the tree roots, but also that rocks themselves have spirits, as does water, and many other things that we call “inanimate.”

Granddad, when he got very old, sold the house, and I was distraught that the house would no longer be in our family. The land was full of wonderful, rich magic. I had heard that the people who were buying the house would subdivide the land to make back some of the money they spent to buy the place, and one of the lots that was to be sold was exactly where the wee folks’ cellar hole was. That would surely chase them from the land. Not only is such an act cruel to the wee folk, but it ruins the land itself by taking away its magic. It also diminishes human life – by taking away the land’s magic, it also takes away whatever magic is in our lives.