Real Magic

A writer encounters magic on a troll hunt through the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens

Words By Jenny O’Connell

Roskva stands among the trunks. Heavy, strong, and twenty feet tall, the wooden troll hugs a pine tree with one hand, presses her knuckles into the dirt with the other. Her eyes follow us wherever we go. A small child climbs around her ankles while his mother half-heartedly begs him to come down. She grips her umbrella and tries to watch her son but she can’t help staring at the troll, mouth open in quiet awe. It is impossible to look up at Roskva, her expressive eyebrows and spiky shipping-pallet hair, without entertaining the possibility of magic.

I have given up on anything that resembles adult-like composure. I’m squealing, clapping my hands, and Bob is laughing, and his friend Becca, from Brunswick, is taking photos. Before this, we tiptoed through milkweed and clover searching for the bright flitter-flap of butterfly wings, and then we spent half an hour trying to find a dahlia the exact shade of Becca’s purple hair. Delight is cumulative and I can no longer hold it in my body. It needs somewhere to go.

Bob, who lives in California, is a friend I seldom see, but this makes our ratio of magic moments quite high. In fact, I’m pretty sure that this is why he’s in my life. He is six-foot-four with a soft mustache and thoughtful eyes and large, nimble hands that can juggle just about anything you throw at him. He’s fairly quiet until you get him going, listening more than he speaks, remembering all of it. Our short bursts of time together have always been packed with magic, hiking for miles over coastal Californian hills in the misty dark on a winding trail lit by glow sticks; or spinning on a dance floor, bedecked in sparkles, amid a pulsing throng of ultimate frisbee players. It makes sense that the first time I see him in nearly a decade, we’re hunting for trolls in the rain.

In the Lerner Garden of the Five Senses the three of us eat juicy peppercorns straight off the vine, spicy-sweet pockets of flavor. We take off our shoes and try to feel our way to the center of the stone labyrinth with our eyes shut. Fog collects on our eyelashes. Around us are lush green lawns, trellises hung with flowers and squash, a children’s storybook garden, fountains. Everywhere the sound of water. The to-do list I’ve left at home has vanished from my mind, along with my plans for this evening. I’ve forgotten what time is. I’ve forgotten I have a phone. All of my attention is on the soggy map in Bob’s hands that shows us where to find the trolls, and it’s leading us deeper into the forest.

Birk holds the roots. His beard is made of them, thick and twisted, cut from downed trees on the property. He’s thirty feet tall, legs sprawled wide and palms firmly planted on the ground. A chipmunk pokes her head out of one of his nostrils and scampers up his shoulder, but Birk keeps his gaze on the knotted copse of trees by the river. Down the way people have built a tiny village for the fairies—dwellings of stick and stone tucked between the roots of trees or leaning against rocks, cave-like and cozy. Balconies made of bark. Mushroom chimneys. Leaf umbrellas. Bob and Becca and I get to work arranging sticks and fallen leaves. Winter is coming and we don’t want the fairies to catch cold.

I am a person who is always looking for magic. There are things I do that I don’t readily admit in the company of other adults. Sometimes I pretend the stairs are a piano, and I sing as I go up and down. When I check into a hotel room on a business trip, the first thing is always to take off my pants and bounce on the bed. At the moment the orange sun dips below the horizon, I jump to try and see it set twice. And I still, at 36, talk to trees. I wrap my arms around their trunks, whisper my questions. Murmur their names like prayers: birch, ash, pine, spruce, maple, hemlock, cherry, aspen. Nearly all of the Eastern forest is threatened by a foreign insect or fungus, deforestation or climate change. When I see an old-growth tree standing thick and strong in the woods, I cry. Kiss the bark, say thank you, thank you.

Guardians of the Seeds, the trolls are called. Built by Danish recycled art activist Thomas Dambo, they stand vigil along the 300 acres of lovingly-maintained Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens—an incredible place to connect to nature in its own right—to remind us to venture outside, to care for the forest, and to pay attention. Their motto: “A future without trees is no future at all.” Gro represents the leaves. We find her in the Rhododendron Garden on a hill opposite a waterfall, curly ears and fur of salvaged oak bark, catching raindrops and sunbeams in her big hands. Her eyes are closed, mouth open in a deep breath. Søren is my favorite—his curious and playful expression, his wild straight-up hair, his arms and legs frozen in a wacky dance, sticking out in every direction like branches.

I am compiling a list of Things That Are Magic, and here it is so far: Moonlight on water. The saucy shimmer of an August evening. A particularly sweet tomato. Rain. Flickering candlelight. The silent seconds after a song ends. The Internet (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but one never knows why, or how). Goat cheese. Fireflies. Fragrance of lilac. A lover’s fingers pressed gently into the nape of my neck. A slow kiss.

Lawn sprinklers. Hummingbirds. Whale song. Dancing. The point in a good book when a hook appears behind my bellybutton and yanks me all the way through the end. The point on a run when I forget that I’m running. A baby’s tiny fingers. The smell of snow. An airplane landing strip at night. Prisms. Treehouses. The way a dog knows when it’s time to go outside and lay down to meet her death.

The moments before dawn when everyone in the house is breathing in the dark. Yellow leaves spinning against blue sky. The perfect bite: salt, fat, crunch, squish, honey; the way my body trembles to taste it. Rocks. Love notes left for strangers in brick walls. The gentle, lilting melody of water. You belong to me, it says to the shore, over and over.

“There are two paths to magic: imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods. Paying attention is about intentional noticing,” writes poet Jarod K. Anderson. “Magic requires our attention, our choice to participate.

We must choose to meet it halfway. And when we do, we often find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning. A nod to the unquantifiable.”

This place. Did you know that owl feathers are studded with fringe that muffles the sound of their flight? That an Eastern hemlock can live for over 500 years? That river otters hold hands while they sleep? That some mosses glow in the dark? A white pine cluster has five needles, which is the same number as the letters w-h-i-t-e. A red pine has three: r-e-d.

There are so many corners in my heart for this.

Our raincoats are soaked through and our stomachs are starting to growl. We tuck pruned fingers into pockets, shiver through the salty afternoon as it melts into evening. The last troll is Lilja, who holds the scent of the flowers like a child, her arms thrown open wide like petals. She is the smallest of all, her face and neck made of salvaged floorboards, but when Bob and Becca put their hands together and try to wrap around her in a hug, they’re nowhere close to reaching. We play marimbas and chimes with mallets, scramble across the rope bridge in a treehouse. Bob turns a crank and loon song spills out, sending goosebumps up my arms.

I don’t recall ducking into the cave, but when I think back to this day in the gardens, this will be the first thing I remember: Gray light creeping through the cracks, sudden silence. Bob’s face in the dark, lit with a startled tenderness, as if he, too, can’t quite believe that we have found ourselves here, skin smelling of sage and lavender, pressing our noses into sweet blooms as we marvel at small bright things without needing to know their names.

I start to speak, and then stop. There’s nothing to say. This is real magic, this garden with the rain coming down, the tangled woods beyond where trolls stand watch and trees grow old and tall. And us, here and now, meeting it halfway.