Fairy Circles My friend, Katy, and I put snowballs in the freezer one December and found them again in July. We couldn't have the snowball fight we'd planned since they had solidified and might have knocked us out. So instead, we made slushies out of a couple and took the rest outside. There, we played catch with them and rubbed them on our sweaty foreheads, our suntanned arms and legs, until our fingers were so numb they ached. Finally we set them in a row and offered them to the sun. There was something both magical and sad seeing them melt into the hot July sidewalk, knowing that they'd come from another season and time. Katy had a lot of wonderful traits; she was smart, pretty, and had the confidence to pursue her own ideas, even if other people thought they were stupid. She once sent a letter to President Nixon inviting him to a play that her parents were in. He sent a kind letter back, declining. Katy and I believed in fairies although we'd never actually seen any. We left presents for them on a stump in our favorite part of the woods, which was actually some elderly couple's yard, but they didn't seem to mind us running through it and dancing in the fairy rings that grew there. Although Catholic, Katy's family practiced trancendental meditation and she taught me how to meditate, too. I was highly honored when she told me her mantra, since she wasn't supposed to tell anyone. We once took an oath to be best friends forever, pricking our fingers and mingling our blood. When we got together with Lisa, though, things tended to get a bit naughty, whether it was mooning cars, ringing doorbells and then hiding, making prank phone calls or rehearsing stripteases to the "Famous Burlesque Routines" album we found in the basement. One night when I stayed over at Katy's house, I awoke to find her on all fours repeatedly banging her head into the wall. That scared me, and when I woke her up she told me she'd been doing that a lot lately but had no idea why. A few months later she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. After her surgery, she was sent to a nursing home in Florida. Although I never heard from her again, I still think of Katy when I see fairy circles in the spring.