I have been thinking about fairy houses lately, those tiny structures created out of whatever materials are lying around in nature. That’s what makes the fairies feel safe, my daughter would tell me when she was quite young, that the house is built out of wild materials — twigs and moss, leaves and stones, perhaps a roof made from the tops of acorns, and a walkway of fallen pine needles.

They can’t be planned either, she would add. A fairy house had to come together by a sort of search and rescue mission of assembled bits and pieces. And as you worked, the fairies would watch from some nearby nook, out of sight but always there, deciding whether the structure and the builders were right for them.

I miss many things from my daughter’s way-back childhood but today, while sitting on the porch a few days before her high school graduation, it is the fairy houses we built out there, where the lawn meets the woods, that I can’t stop thinking about.

Pickle often wore a toy hard hat as she worked, but not like her older brother who wore the little yellow hat in regulation style, ready for whatever project awaited him. Pickle liked to peel away the plastic inside of the hat and wear only that on her head. She looked a bit odd this way, her small head encased in clear plastic, and that is another thing I miss as I contemplate her leaving later this summer for college — the endless costumes she created as a little kid out of whatever she found lying around the house. Colorful scarves and hats, sunglasses too large for her face, her brother’s soccer socks, which on her stretched way past her thighs — the list of her eccentric outfits is long and wondrous. And as we worked on our fairy house constructions I could almost hear the fairies laughing at the sight of us.

“Do you hear that?” I would ask her.

Then we would both grow quiet, Pickle’s four-year-old cheek pressed against mine as we listened intently to the sounds of the woods, a rustle in the leaves, a ripple in the wind.

“It’s them,” Pickle would whisper back.

“Maybe, but let’s keep listening,” I would answer, not wanting the moment to end, the two of us breathing together as one, lost in a world of magic and make believe that also felt more real to me than anything I had ever encountered before.

When you become a parent, you know your life will change drastically, but it is more of an overwhelming force rather than a feeling filled with specifics. Basically, you have no clue about what awaits, the highs and lows of emotions, or that on many Saturday afternoons you will be rummaging around in the dirt, collecting twigs and leaves, rocks and clover to welcome a fairy family into your life.

Nor do you know that so many years later, long after the fairy houses have been swept away by the wind and rain, you will be sitting alone on the porch when your daughter returns from her high school graduation rehearsal, holding her cap and gown in her hand. She will smile and laugh and stop for a moment to tell you the story of her day, and although you are smiling and laughing too, you are really holding on to each word with a ferocity that will startle you because once again you realize how much you love this child and can’t imagine ever letting her go.

Then she will enter the house, still laughing and ready to tell her mother the story of her day, while you remain on the porch, not really sure of who you are anymore.

And you will sit there, unable to move at first, until the wind picks up, just a little, and the leaves rustle out there in the underbush, where the yard meets the woods. And then you will smile as you think, maybe you are not so alone after all.