A Modern American Tale of the Consequences of Angering the Good People

   So a few months back at Pantheacon I was lucky enough to attend a class on the Other Crowd taught by Lora O'Brien. I enjoyed the class very much (and recommend it to anyone who may have a chance to attend it themselves). At one point Lora told a story of a friend of hers and the consequences he'd dealt with after trying to build a house partially on a Fairy Path, a story I was reminded of while reading Jane Brideson's blog today which had a similar theme. Later at Pantheacon, I shared a story with Lora that I'd like to share here as well, of my own family's experience with what happens when you anger the Good Neighbors.
  Now I live in the northeast United States, but as it happens I have a fairy thorn in my yard. That's a bit of a story of its own, but suffice to say that I'm certain it is, and we have left offerings to the aos si there for many years now.
   Last summer my husband was doing yard work and damaged the tree. He came inside and told me that he had accidentally taken a palm sized chunk of bark off of the trunk. I immediately told him to go out and apologize and leave an offering at the tree, because the Fair Folk are notorious for punishing those who damage Fairy Thorns. I was so worried about that I went out myself and left some cookies and poured out some honey, because I was afraid of the consequences to the household luck and to my husband. Unfortunately he decided since I had done this there was no need for him to do anything.
   A week went by, and then around 7 one morning I heard a tremendous crash. Grabbing my young son I ran out and found my husband's car impaled by an enormous branch, which had plunged down like a spear from an oak tree. The branch had gone through the car and broken, so that part of it still jutted up while the rest lay on the ground next to the vehicle. Glass, bark, leaves, and splintered wood lay everywhere.
    I was grateful that my husband hadn't been in the car. I was thinking that after living in that neighborhood for more than 30 years nothing like that had ever happened before. I was immediately suspicious that it wasn't a simple accident, that on a morning with no wind, no storm, no reason for the branch to fall - and no logic for it to have fallen on the car and not straight down to the ground next to the driveway - there was something Fay afoot. It looked for all the world as if a giant hand had thrown the 15 + foot branch like a spear through the vehicle.
    I ran back inside and woke my husband, asking him if he'd made the offering I'd told him to, to the Good People after the incident with the tree. No, he told me, he hadn't, because he thought what I had done was enough. Up he got from bed and out I made him go to make an offering right then, before anything else could happen.
   And I can say that he won't ever make that mistake again....