Words left for mythical fairies bolstered her, miraculously appearing at just the right times. Inside are messages that make her laugh and others that choke her up. Hundreds of notes fill a scrapbook she lays out on the floor of her sunny front sitting room in Saratoga Springs. “The flame that burned inside me, it was taking its last dying breath.” I felt like there was no hope for me,” says Frampton, who hadn’t yet finished college and couldn’t find work for more than minimum wage. Hundreds of notes gathered by the Gnomist fill several scrapbooks. Everything that transpired was thanks to others, she says, and a gift to her. What she did, she says, was as much for herself and her children – whom she was desperate to shield from the pain of divorce – as it was for anyone else. She insists that she was only a facilitator in Overland Park. The attention and adoration both touches and baffles her. And she opens up a big box to reveal a homemade fairy house, just sent to her by a young person in Colorado. She laughs about the band of “ninja moms” she met at the Kansas screening, a group that scoured the trail at night in search of the bandits who were stealing and breaking doors. She recalls the strangers who’ve reached out, including those who’ve cried on her shoulder. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.” “It all comes at me,” she says, her eyes welling. With the world steeped in hatred, filmmaker Sharon Liese says “The Gnomist” somehow has emerged as a salve, an uplifting ray of light, a reminder of humanity’s goodness.įrampton can hardly believe the standing ovations she’s gotten at screenings and can’t bear to look up at the masses. So far, the film has been viewed online about 2 million times. They come when she speaks of the overwhelming reaction to the film, which was released in the hours leading up to the November 13 Paris terrorist attacks. We step out of the cold and into the warm home and embrace of the woman we’ve come to visit: The Gnomist. On the morning drive there, sunlight cuts through scattered clouds and the Wasatch Range to the east, the rays twirling in an enchanted dance. Saratoga Springs, Utah, is a quiet bedroom community about 35 miles south of Salt Lake City. We set out to find Frampton and see what happened next. The family behind this dreamlike world, a mother and two sons still finding their way after a divorce, uprooted and drove off into the unknown. The whimsy of the Firefly Forest they’d created along a suburban wooded trail captured the imagination of children and adults, drew strangers together in wonderment and comforted a family reeling from grief.įrampton’s fairy houses and fanciful tree-hollow homes – and the effect they had – were chronicled in “The Gnomist,” the critically acclaimed short film that was acquired by CNN Films and featured last month on “Great Big Story.”īy the end of the film, the evidence of their efforts – with one exception – had been removed. She and her sons were loaded in their white minivan, leaving behind a legacy in Overland Park, Kansas. Last time we saw Robyn Frampton was June 2014. Don’t be a gnome-hater.ĭone watching? Great. And spoiler alert: If you keep reading first, you’ll ruin the surprise of the video later. Only then will the rest of this piece make sense. “If this was my tree,” she remembers thinking, “this is what I’d do.”īefore you read further, if you haven’t already, please watch the video at the top of the article or just below. She peered around in wonder and, just as she did decades earlier, dreamt what was possible. She couldn’t help herself and climbed right in. She was in her 30s when she spotted her first hollow tree, an enormous live oak on a plantation in Charleston, South Carolina. Her aunt died before she was 10, but her spirit still inspired the girl. They were little surprises like pint-sized glass mushrooms she placed along her windowsill, fueling her young imagination. She gave her gifts of tiny boxes that held hidden gems. Her Aunt Marilyn saw and appreciated her fascination with discovery. She’d look up and imagine what could be, what life would look like if she could live among them. As a small child living in Colorado, she used to sneak across the street to sit in the center of a clump of trees.
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