A peek inside the Beltane story: Shanna and the Water Fairy

Readers have been waiting a whole year for the next installment of Shanna's story. Words fall quick but the pictures to make a story come fully alive take more time. 

Still the wait has been worth it. The third Shanna book has the most beautiful illustrations yet and a story that will keep kids breathless for each succeeding chapter--judging from my experience reading it out loud. 

This time eleven-year-old Shanna discovers a hidden spring on the city waste land behind her new school. When she learns that the spring and the pocket paradise of trees and flowers around it is to be bulldozed to make way for a new shopping mall, Shanna is horrified. Not only is the spring a beautiful place and the water is sorely needed to help irrigate the soccer field and school playground, she's also pretty sure there is something--or someone--magical about the spring.

After Shanna writes a letter of protest to the local newspaper, she and her eight-year-old brother Rye get a glimpse of the grown-up world of city politics. They learn about activism and how committed individuals can make a difference in a community. In the midst of it, they share the celebration of Beltane with their friends from many cultures and help to spread the love and passion for justice that infuses this special day.

While this is the third book in the Children's Wheel of the Year series and readers of the other books will recognize the main characters, the book can easily be read on its own. It is a real-world adventure story for kids who care about their community, their friends and the earth. 

Now with no further ado, here is an excerpt from the beginning of Shanna and the Water Fairy . If you would like to see how this story appears on a Kindle, you can click on the orange button to go directly to an Amazon Kindle preview of the book. No app or other download required.

Chapter One: The Spring

Shanna grasped the rough rock and pulled with all of her strength. She gulped in a great lung-full of the rich spring air and heaved herself over the last boulder just ahead of Rohan, Ella and Rebecca. 

“Queen of the mountain!” she chortled as she spun in a circle and waved her arms in the warm, free air.

Her friends pulled themselves up and collapsed giggling on the rock beside her. 

“You’re too fast!” Ella puffed, as she sucked on a scraped finger.

“I’ll beat you next time,” Rohan laughed as he pretended to tackle Shanna’s foot.

“You kids be careful on those rocks,” their teacher’s voice floated up to them from the trees below. “There could be rattlesnakes.”

“I think we’re making enough noise to scare away the rattlesnakes, Mrs. Baker,” Rebecca called down. “And you said we were supposed to find as many different kinds of rocks as possible.”

“Well, did you find any new rocks while you were scaling the mountain?” Mrs. Baker’s voice sounded like she was chuckling now. 

“I think so,” Rohan called down and he held up a speckled rock. “This might be granite.”
Another group of kids came running out of the trees to show Mrs. Baker their new rocks. They were led by a girl with light brown hair. She was Brandy, the most popular girl in the fifth grade. And she didn’t like Shanna. If she was entirely honest with herself, Shanna had to admit that she didn’t like Brandy either. 

But looking down from way up on the rocks, Brandy looked small and Shanna thought about how her new school wasn’t as bad as she’d first feared. Mrs. Baker, her class teacher, was a lot of fun. She had gray hair, but she still loved to go on field trips, and she found a way to do a lot of lessons outside—even math. 

This warm spring day they were collecting rocks for science. It was also for math though, because Mrs. Baker said they would be practicing percentages and graphs once they gathered all of the different kinds of rocks they could find on the waste land behind the school. 

The waste land was a long, low hill that ran up from the back of the soccer field through brush and rocks and a few scraggly trees to the new River View Condos. It wasn’t really a park and there was litter here and there among the boulders and water-starved trees, but Mrs. Baker said they had to learn as much as they could from it before it got bulldozed. 

Ella and Rebecca started looking for more rocks, walking up the gradual hill behind the Queen of the Mountain boulders. Shanna followed them at first, but then she saw dark green rocks down in a little gully under some particularly nice trees, so she slipped and slid her way down. 

As she got close she heard a splashing sound like water hitting a rock. Was someone pouring out their water bottle? What else would make that sound out here?

Shanna looked in among the trees. They didn’t look very high down in the gully, but they were actually bigger and less scraggly than most of the other trees on the wasted land. 

The whole country here was pretty dry and trees didn’t grow in big forests the way they had where Shanna used to live. There was usually just one or two trees together. But in this little gully there was a whole clump and the grass around them was lush and green. Out on the open hillside the grass was already turning yellow from the dry heat, even in April. Mrs. Baker called it a “drought.” 

Curious, Shanna stepped closer. In the little hollow under the trees the air smelled wetter. And the grass beneath her feet was brilliant green. Shanna saw something sparkle and flutter in among the trees. Maybe a butterfly.

She climbed over some big rocks and slipped in between the trunks of the trees. And there behind the trees were more flowers than she had ever seen outside a flower shop. Red, purple, yellow, blue, orange… They hung down the rocks and covered the ground under the trees.

Shanna looked around for the butterfly and there were at least ten of them, flitting in and out of the sunlight and shade. She was about to call out for her friends to come and see the beautiful scene, but something stopped her. 

One of the butterflies was different. It seemed to glow against the shadows under the trees and Shanna couldn’t see it right. It didn’t even look like a butterfly exactly, but it wouldn’t hold still so she couldn’t get a good look at it.

Instead it zipped back and forth as if showing Shanna the way forward. It dipped first at Shanna and then back further into the trees. Shanna walked carefully now, trying not to step on all the beautiful flowers. The air in the little grove of trees was sweet with the smell of them—almost overwhelming, so it made Shanna dizzy. 

And maybe she was just dizzy when she looked up from her feet again and stared. 

There in front of her was an even more amazing image. Flowers with delicate dew-speckled petals hung down all over a wall of boulders. And the rocks weren’t really dark green like Shanna had thought. Instead they were covered with thick, wet moss.

And out of a crack there came a sparkling trickle of crystal clear water. It leaped and splashed down the rocks below and filled a little pool, before trickling under the roots of a big tree and disappearing back into the ground. It wasn’t a stream exactly, because it just went back into the ground.

But that wasn’t even why Shanna stared. Right in the middle above the sparkling pool was her butterfly. But Shanna was sure for a wonderful, dizzy second that it wasn’t just a butterfly. It had the shape of a person with wings and it shone with a turquoise light. Its wings were violet purple like the flowers and its hair was a deep blue green. Shanna couldn’t see it much better than that.

Then it winked a deep greenish-brown eye at her and dove straight down into the water. In a flash and a sparkle of drops, it was gone. 

“Ella! Rebecca! Rohan! Come quick!” Shanna cried over her shoulder, too startled and amazed to rethink her shout. 

She dropped to her knees on the mossy rock by the pool of water and looked around as carefully as she could. Where had it gone? 

Had she seen what she thought she’d seen? A butterfly? Or… could it really be… a fairy? A real fairy?

The other kids came panting into the grove of trees with thudding footsteps muffled by the grass, and Shanna didn’t see it anymore whatever it was. She thought then that she shouldn’t have yelled, but it was too exciting.

“Wow! This is a really cool place,” Rohan said, looking around at the trees, the climbing and hanging flowers, and the little pool. “Good find, Shanna.” He grinned and ran a hand over one of the tree trunks.

“It’s like it called to me,” Shanna said, still caught in the feeling of wonder.

A children's book for water protectors

Last spring, before I had heard of Standing Rock, I wrote the first draft of Shanna and the Water Fairy -- a story to foster the innate passion of children for social and ecological justice. 

If you don't want your child to become an environmental activist, you might not want to let her or him read this book. 

It's part of the Children's Wheel of the Year series, but as with all of these books, Shanna and the Water Fairy can be read as a stand-alone adventure story. This time Shanna, an eleven-year-old girl in a typical American school, discovers a hidden spring on city waste land that is slated to be bulldozed and turned into a new shopping mall.

The spring is tucked away in a rocky gully--a pocket oasis of flowers, lush ferns and life in the midst of a dry drought-stricken land. It's a tiny, seasonal spring overlooked by the construction project's environmental report. Yet Shanna discovers something magical. 

A guardian resides in the spring, a mysterious changeable being or perhaps a real-live fairy. Shanna and her brother Rye decide the spring and its magical patron must be protected. They learn the first steps in local activism and find support in their community, while creating a homemade Beltane celebration of spring that brings together families of various faiths.

I come from dry, semi-desert country and I understood water as precious since early childhood. Shanna and the Water Fairy was born out of that deeply-rooted relationship to the land and water. As a young teen, I fought for a small spring in the dry mountains of Eastern Oregon.

The active protection of home, land and life is in no way beyond the comprehension of children. And in today's world that can often mean defending water.

This time the Shanna books turn to a topic that is by no means limited to earth-based and Pagan holidays and the themes they teach. Shanna and the Water Fairy is a book that celebrates Beltane and the fiery passions that are stirred by both love and war. But it does so with characters from a wide variety of faiths and in the context of a community effort spearheaded by a child.

Painting by Julie Freel

As I edited the book and Julie Freel prepared illustrations over the past year, test readers often remarked that I had written a good book in response to the events at Standing Rock. At first I was confused. There is very little  in the story that is similar to the story of Standing Rock. The activist is far from native to the area, the struggle is purely local and its only tie to the vast tides of politics and climate change is the implied reason for the on-going drought.

But as the year went on I came to see why the book left test readers with a feeling of connection to Standing Rock and new energy for community action. It is a different event and the spring came from my own childhood, but in the end this book, my long-ago spring and Standing Rock are all part of the same story.

The earth is our home. We need the earth, the land, the air, the water, the trees... Beltane or May Day, the passion of the young--it is all tied to this. If anyone is to be a warrior today, the obvious pledge of allegiance is to the earth, our home and our source of life.