The Fairy Tale of the New Brooms

Dear Reader

Many years ago, a few model airplane enthusiasts ran a small airfield with a little cottage on the edge of the forest—unfortunately not made of gingerbread—and a very small paved runway. That is likely why a little elf, who surely meant well, one day gave the group two very small brooms as a gift. The suspicion that a long-suffering family man “disposed of” his young children’s brooms in the little hut cannot be conclusively confirmed. The hut—an architectural blend of a Black Forest cottage and a Zurich grotto—had a low, hard-to-access annex. It was impossible to find it in the dark without banging your toes horribly at least three times. One day, the two brooms must have gotten on the nerves of another good spirit. Perhaps he thought the two children’s

brooms were pointlessly taking up space, or perhaps he even wanted to sweep the path and, frustrated by the limited effect of his efforts, threw the brooms into the farthest corner of the annex. Be that as it may, another helpful forest spirit—presumably a mining or construction pro—decided that the trail, which had grown larger in the meantime, could only be cleaned efficiently with a professional street-sweeping broom. And, since sweeping a trail all by himself wasn’t much fun for forest spirits at all, he spontaneously went out and bought two of these wide-bristled brooms. But even with these super-tools, history seemed to repeat itself. “I wanted to sweep the trail and couldn’t find a usable broom,” said a root gnome, his face etched with Nitro scars, in a slightly reproachful tone, “so I bought two new ones.” Sure enough, there in the tool shed were two

brand-new brooms. Not quite as wide as the mining spirit’s—either he’d underestimated the length of the trail or didn’t trust his biceps to handle it. At least the idea that sweeping in pairs would get the job done faster—and be more fun to boot—seemed to have caught on. Where on earth had the first wide professional brooms gone? The little house spirit was already beginning to seriously worry about a broom-eating big bad wolf when another forest spirit surprised him with a “primitive broom.” A huge thing, like the ones farmers used to use to clean their farmyards, and on which witches still ride through the sky on Walpurgis Night. In fact, only one of all the earlier brooms remained—and, as mentioned, there were two of them… Well, that was simply too much for a veteran house elf of the

Good, and it crawled into the outbuilding, risking its life. What it found there surpassed the wildest imaginings of all dwarves and forest spirits: shuddering slightly, it felt no fewer than five brooms! Some self-proclaimed spoilsport had probably never seen a broom before and therefore had no idea what to do with those bristly things, or he thought that clearing the trail of leaves and pine needles was pointless anyway, since he himself only whiz around on the “foam ones”—and even then, only at the witching hour; for useless things are always tossed into the outbuilding—and that’s presumably what happened to all the brooms. And the moral of the story: New brooms are good, but sweeping is better!

Best regards
, Emil Giezendanner