Angela’s grandmother had a spoonful of blue honey with her tea every morning. Angela never quite worked out why her grandmother’s honey was blue, though. All she knew was that she was not allowed to touch the blue honey. Even touching the blue honey jar was verboten, so she never tried. Eventually, she forgot about the color of her grandmother’s honey and it became one of those little mysteries that adults keep from the children that surround them.

When Angela reached the age of sixteen, her grandmother took her into the cellar and showed her the corner where she kept the honey jars. All of the jars on the shelf were filled with dark cloudy honey. Some were darker than others, though, which was new.

“You’re old enough to understand what I do down here,” her grandmother said. She pulled a basket off the shelf and walked up the stairs. When they got back to the kitchen, Angela’s grandmother dumped the contents of the basket onto the chopping block on the counter.

“Those are mushrooms,” her grandmother said. She lifted up a blue, dried cap. “We grind them up and dump them into the honey.”

“That seems simple,” Angela said.

“It is simple,” Her grandmother said. “But that’s just the first step. Everything after that is complicated.”

Angela helped her mother grind up the mushrooms and dump the powder into a freshly opened honey jar. She went to lick the mushroom powder off her fingers and her grandmother stopped her. “Don’t do that,” she said. “That comes later.”

They took the honey downstairs and put it on the shelf next to the other jars. “The spores in the mushrooms live in the honey and eventually turn it blue,” her grandmother explained. “It takes a full year, though, which is why there are so many jars on the shelf.”

“What kind of mushrooms are they?” Angela asked.

Her grandmother smiled. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

The next day, Angela’s grandmother prepared the tea the same way she had since Angela could remember. Instead of one teacup, though, there were two. “One for me and one for you,” her grandmother explained. When the tea was done steeping, her grandmother put a spoonful of blue honey into each cup.

They sat and drank their tea and talked about trivialities for a while. Just as Angela was on the verge of asking what the point of the honey was, the boundaries of the room began to get fuzzy. “Ah,” her grandmother said. “It’s starting.”

“What is it?” Angela said. She was calm because her grandmother was calm, and the strangeness of the room was starting to get interesting.

“The honey opens our eyes,” her grandmother said. “It lets us see into the faerie realms. Come outside, girl.”

They walked outside and Angela was astonished to see that the world was full of faeries, just like her grandmother had promised. There were tiny little winged creatures moving from flower to flower, flitting around with the speed of a dragonfly and the beauty of a butterfly. Angela reached for one and was held back by her grandmother. “You can’t touch them,” she said. “Don’t even try.”

“But what use is it to just look at them?” Angela said.

“Ours is a terrible burden,” her grandmother explained. “My mother – and her mother before her – visited the faerie realms every day. When I was your age, I was told what the blue honey was for and I was introduced to our obligation, just as I’m doing with you. I tried to do this with your mother, but she thought the honey was just for kicks. This isn’t something you do for fun, Angela. This is very important. Always remember that.”

Angela nodded, wide eyed. Her grandmother’s fearsome visage relaxed and the smiling face returned. “What is our obligation?”

“We are here to listen to the faeries, to keep their homes happy and alive. Precious few people have flowers or gardens anymore and we have an obligation to maintain this one.”

Angela’s grandmother had a huge garden – several acres, at least – and Angela had wandered over most of it during her childhood. In doing so, she had found several places that would be perfect to bring a boy and do those things that boys and girls do when they have time and privacy together. (Angela was still a bit unsure about what those things were. Kissing, probably. Although why anyone would need privacy to kiss was beyond her.)

Still, if her newfound ability to see faeries meant that she had to help her grandmother with the garden, then Angela really wouldn’t mind very much. It seemed like such a small thing to have to do for such beautiful sights.

“Do you do this every day?” Angela asked her grandmother.

“Every day,” her grandmother replied.

Over the next few years, her grandmother taught Angela everything she needed to know about finding the proper mushrooms in the neighboring cow pastures, how to gather the honey from the beehives in the back of the garden and, most importantly, how to listen to the faeries when they spoke. This last process took patience and a certain amount of skill. They spoke often, but their voices were small and difficult to distinguish from the wind generated by their wings flapping. Angela learned it all. Her grandmother was a good teacher and had a happy, willing student.

There were only two things her grandmother could not teach her. The first was how to deal with boys. Angela’s grandmother had to learn that on her own and felt that the lessons should be firsthand and direct, never through instruction. Hands on learning worked for her and she was firm in the belief that it would work for Angela.

So Angela learned. She wandered over to neighboring houses and met the boys that lived around her. When she was interested in them, she brought them back to the garden and shared her secret places. They were always eager to visit the first time, but only rarely did they return for a second, third or fourth visit. Angela learned the tricks of their body quickly and was happy to be sexual, but she was continually baffled about why they never seemed to want to talk.

Anglela had not yet figured that particular male mystery out when she was confronted with the second lesson her grandmother never taught her. All her grandmother had told her about death was that one day, the women in their line walked into the faerie realms. It was their reward for listening to the denizens of the garden.

And that’s exactly what her grandmother did. One morning, they had their tea together, just like they always did. When Angela went to ask her grandmother something, she couldn’t find her.

Angela spent the entire day looking all over the garden for her grandmother, but was completely unable to find her. In the end, something – reflex, perhaps – made her sit down and wait for the faeries to talk to her. In the past, that had always been an option when she got confused or distracted. The faeries helped her find an inner spot, free of turmoil and help her get her mind back to where it needed to be.

In this case, finding her center took longer than Angela expected. When she finally found it, though, she realized that the reason her grandmother was gone was that she’d walked on into the fair realms, away from the garden and the world that she had lived in her entire life. The realization made Angela sad, but she smiled through her tears because she knew from the evidence of her own senses that her grandmother had gone on to a much brighter, more interesting place than this.

Eventually, Angela got up and walked back to the house. It was now her house and she intended to live there until she died or discovered the secret of men, whichever happened first.