Magic At The Edge of A Forest

I first heard the music on a day like today. The branches of the old trees outside my window mirrored the ebb and flow of the ocean as the wind moved it gently to and fro.
Aeolus herself scatters the dry leaves across the driveway, and the sound is reminiscent of bacon fat as it pops and sizzles in my mother's favorite cast iron pan. Beyond that, somewhere in the deep forest is music like the flute of the faerie God Pan, spry, nimble, and inviting. Something stirs at my center. What is this lilting sound that is never-ending, that which calls me from my place on the hard wooden floor where I sit?

It beckons me to stand and part the windows and run without abandon into the inviting forest where the music played without restraint. Alas, my toys, my men, my soldiers, my baker, my tailor, my rabbi, my little family in their humble wooden home, forlorn and sad, begged me with pained expressions not to leave them behind. They asked me to free them, that they too could go where the music called. I parted the curtains, and my animal toys cried, my fowls, my cattle, my dogs, begged me to not leave them behind as they were useful only to me and no one else.

"The music calls," I told them. "The magical forest of deep red and cornflower blue, of trees that are like the globes of the earth in Ms. Felcher's class, are casting wonderful spells as we speak. I must go without delay."

"Take us, please," my toys pleaded. "Don't leave us to ourselves in this old hospital, to be tossed about and left at the bottom of a box, only to be pulled at and yanked and have our heads pounded on the floor again and again. Take us where we can hear the music and see the spells."

We flee the confines of the children's hospital, my toys and I. My beautiful, excellent leftover and discarded toys from Dachau, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. We run as free as the music, which calls us to the mysterious forest of delightful magic and hypnotic spells.