The necessity of imagination
Ten years ago before St. Patrick’s Day, my middle son and I listened for tiny feet on our front porch — leprechaun feet heading into the trap, the kindergarten project he built to catch them.
Whenever squirrels cavorted or the wind threw twigs across the floorboards outdoors, Andy, then 6, stopped everything to run out and check the trap. To build it, he had repurposed a package that looked like an old-timey cigar box, but originally came to us as a gift filled with fancy soaps. Then, he gently peeled a green foil shamrock from our window decorations to glue on its top flap.
To weather proof that top, he used up a roll of Scotch tape with ridge lines as thick as mini shaker shingles “to keep the rain out.”
Then, he baited the trap with a chain of reflective shamrocks and tiny bits of marshmallow that he stuck all over inside in a one-nibble-for-me, one-pinch-for-thetrap fashion.
That way, the leprechaun’s slippered feet would get mired, but he wouldn’t starve waiting for Andy to find him.
I wished then as much as I’ve wished for anything , really — that I could make a nimble sprite materialize for him to find trapped by the sweet stuff.
Instead, I explained away the empty box — explained that leprechauns cleverly avoid capture to keep the path to their pots of gold secret.
Then, I kept that leprechaun trap until Andy got to middle school for two reasons: to celebrate how building a trap freed my boy’s playful imagination and industry and to continue clarifying my thinking around children and family life.
The latter reason seemed extra important after a troll — an online commenter with a mean streak — responded to that column.
Here is an excerpt: “Wow. … singularly the most self-absorbed twaddle I have ever read. Ever. You’re not special. Your kids are not special. Your observations about them are absolutely and positively not special. What are you sharing and why?”
The stinging comment gave me food for thought, and I eventually wrote a rebuttal column two years later.
Instead of coming up with something brilliant, I extolled how humdrum joys and satisfactions as trivial as a leprechaun trap project can bloom in the family gardens we tend. And in that garden, I hope to continue nurturing the imagination my kids tap to explore ideas and consider the potential reality of things out of reach.
Years after that, when the leprechaun trap came out with our St. Patrick’s Day decorations every March, I also thought more about the meaning of the controversial Cottingley Fairies photographs to justify why a child building a leprechaun trap still seems worth writing about.
In 1917, cousins Elsie Wright, then 16, and Frances Griffiths, then 9, claimed that they played with fairies by the stream that ran past the family garden in their village of Cottingley near Bradford, England.
The girls took photographs to prove it to their doubtful families, and those images eventually circulated to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — a British author most famous for creating Sherlock Holmes, a fictional detective.
Some called the fairy photos fakes. But Doyle considered them genuine and critical in opening minds to the possibility — if not the ironclad reality — of the psychic phenomena that captivated him.
His timing fell on the heels of Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837 until her death in 1901, when English literature wiggled itself out of the corset of traditionally realistic fiction with educational and moralistic elements and into a growing genre of nonsense and fantasy.
Doyle tapped that interest in an article he wrote about psychic phenomena for the December 1920 issue of The Strand and illustrated it with two of the Cottingley Fairies photos.
The magazine sold out within days of publication, and he hoped that if readers believed the fairies existed, it would “jolt the material