The Cloud Dweller for National Faery Tale Day

I love Faery Tales. I read them and had them read to me when I was a child, and I had my favorites. I was not the princess. I liked the regular girls best before they gained that status. Cinderella and Beauty were the daughters of merchants/storekeepers; Red Riding Hood was a woodcutter’s only child; the heroine of Rumpelstiltskin was a miller’s daughter – and so on.

When I liked the ending as in Rumpelstiltskin I went with the story. Of course I was the miller’s daughter who triumphed over the wicked little creature who would steal my child.

Red Riding Hood I revised when I read it to myself. I was she, but in my version the wolf did not eat me, because I was so tough and so smart. It was I who rescued my grandmother just before my father arrived.

I pondered my propensity to make stories including faery tales suit my ideal – walk on clouds so to speak or ‘head in the clouds’ as momma put it. I wrote the below poem in one of those moments when I had fallen through those insubstantial clouds to the reality of a disabled child and sick husband, and…

The Cloud Dweller

far away

and long ago

there is a child

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