My Favorite Faerie Folk

There’s a Multi-cache that begins in my neighborhood a few blocks away from home. When you get to GZ, you find a yard full of gnome statues. Being not unacquainted with the wily ways of the most benign (and insidious) of the faerie folk, it was not hard for me to divine the location and ultimate destination of the redirector. I put the final on the back burner, though. One early morning while the girls were visiting from L-Town, I decided to go get it and offered them the option to come along. Just as with Prayer Mountain, the older daughter demurred and the younger one accepted. We popped over to the resting place of the final, she spotted and grabbed it, and we both signed the log before bringing back brunch to make a mid-morning meal.

I miss caching with my daughters. I miss when we could just get in a car, go do something fun for ourselves, and, while we were out wherever that was, go and find one. Part of it is that they live 275 miles away, and I don’t see them as much as I used to, but part of it is that they’ve gotten older. My older is about to turn fourteen; her sister just turned twelve. They’ve got TikToks to watch and cool friends to talk with and games to play and school shenanigans to relate. They have their own lives to live, so it’s less likely that they’ll want to go out and grab a cache with me. That doesn’t mean that it never happens anymore. It just happens with less frequency than it once did. They work their works; I mine. And still, some days, they come out with their old man. On a few occasions, they have even bestowed upon me the title of Best Geocacher Ever (sorry, folks, but the people have spoken!). I’m happy to have shared with them that which we have seen together. I hope still to drag them along to find more in the future. And I know that many of us who are parents have sung the same refrain. They get older and lose the fire we retain because they have to burn brightly in other places and other endeavors. But some days, they bring back the old magic. And those days are worth far more than even the favor of Titania and Oberon.