It all started with a fork, an antler-handled serving fork of clean Scandinavian design, part of a spoon & fork set that my parents bought while visiting Norway in the early 1990s and later gave to M. and me at Christmas. We liked them and used them nightly for salads and other dishes.

Then after several years the fork disappeared. Our house is not large—a little under 1,000 sq. ft. on the main level —and we looked all over the kitchen and adjacent living/dining room, — pulling out drawers, furniture, and appliances — but never found it. Things happen.

I don’t do a lot of how-to Pagan writing. When it comes to magick-working, I hold with the “keep silent” part of the “magician’s (or witch’s) pyramid.” But I wanted to share this story, which is not over yet, in case anyone gains anything from reading it. I expect it to spread over three or four blog posts.

So the fork was gone and time passed, and then “they” decided to step up their game early this past winter. I say “they” because there seemed to be deliberate mischief in what was happening. Read on.

We usually drink wine with dinner, so we have — had — this particular corkscrew for years. That evening, I could not find, neither in its drawer nor on the dining table. I just shook my head and pulled out my Swiss Army knife, which has a corkscrew. Problem solved.

That corkscrew, incidentally, is still missing, five months later.

Then last Friday, she went looking for a little plastic dish with a lid (think very small leftover dish, a quarter-cup capacity) that she uses when taking her own homemade almond butter to the coffeehouse to put on bagels. She has used this particular dish for several years, because she can slip it into a purse. It should have been in the dish rack. It was not. We both looked. I cleared the dish rack of clean dishes.

The next day, there was the lid — only the lid — lying in the center of the dish rack.

She had laughed when I blamed “the pixies” for the missing corkscrew. Now she was not laughing.

The bottom of the dish showed a couple of days later — in a cupboard of empty jars and storage containers — inside another lidded container.

And then the lid disappeared again, and M. found it in the pages of a magazine on the living room floor.

Pagan blogger Anne Johnson — in the sidebar as The Gods Are Bored — writes about the fairies now and then, and she and I are keypals sharing common interests in blogging and vultures, so I wrote to her with the story that I have given here.

She had blogged earlier about putting out shiny things for them, and in fact, I had put some old pieces of jewelry etc. on the outdoor shrine altar, whereupon they promptly disappeared.

Yet something more was needed. What did “they” want?

Read Part 2 here