I was invited to do a guest post for Mythical Monday, here is an excerpt and a link:

Of Gnomes and Oreads: the Magic of the Mountain

Mountains. They rise like majestic kings, white-crowned with robes of royal purple and deep blue. The air atop them is different from ordinary air. To be atop a mountain is to breathe magic. One cannot blame our earlier generations for believing that they were full of mythical creatures.

Heck, some mountain dwellers believe that today!

Some of my best childhood memories of magic involve mountains. My family used to spend two weeks during the summer in the White Mountains in New Hampshire, possibly the most magical place in America. One could hardly hike the evergreen-studded slopes without feeling the hush of enchantment.

The locals all believed in magic—or at least in the spirit of it. They told us stories of the spruce trolls who dwelt on the mountainsides, and when you drove under overpasses, you were instructed to knock on the ceiling of your car to honor the trolls who lived under the bridges. Otherwise, they would come at night and play tricks on you.

But the greatest magic of all—which still remains with me today, decades later—was my very first glimpse of mountains themselves.

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