My grandson was going through a dragon phase.
Dragons in books. Dragons in drawings. Dragon toys everywhere.
So one afternoon I suggested something simple:
“Let’s go outside and see if we can find one.”
He was old enough to be skeptical. He knew dragons didn’t exist.
But what he didn’t know was that I had a secret — one I had shared years earlier with his father and aunt when they were going through their own dragon phases.
We pulled on our boots and stepped outside. He immediately began scanning the sky.
That’s when I explained that if you wanted to find dragons in the modern world, you had to look in places that weren’t obvious dragon hangouts. Even though dragons hadn’t been seen for a very, very long time, there might still be evidence of them — if you knew how to look.
We wandered down toward the lake.
“Near water is always a good place to start,” I told him.
We moved slowly along the shoreline, looking under bushes and through the scattered driftwood.
After a few minutes, I spotted what I was looking for.
“Come here!” I called.
His little legs ran toward me, curiosity lighting up his eyes.
I brushed aside a bit of foliage and uncovered a piece of driftwood.
It looked uncannily like a dragon’s head.
The weathered wood curved upward like a snout, and a rough gnarl looked almost like the piercing eye of a dragon.
He gasped.
Then his practical mind kicked in.
“But… isn’t this just a piece of wood, Gma?”
“It could be,” I said thoughtfully.
“But I think it might also be something dragons left behind to show us they were here.”
I lowered my voice.
“Because there are always more.”
“Show me,” he said eagerly.
And so our search continued.
He found one. I found another. Each weather-worn piece of wood revealed dragon shapes if you looked closely enough.
A skeptical little boy slowly became open to possibility, mystery, and magic.
And in his eyes I saw the same wonder I remembered seeing in his father’s eyes many years before.
You see, dragons have been part of our family conversations for a long time.
When my son and daughter were young, they once asked me a very serious question:
“If dinosaurs left fossils behind, why has no one ever discovered a dragon fossil?”
I didn’t have an answer.
So I invented one.
I made up a story about where the dragons might have gone.
Years later, after my children were grown, that little explanation became a children’s book called Where Dragons Went.
It tells the story of what really happened to dragons after humans stopped seeing them.
It’s the story I created to answer that sincere question my children once asked:
If dinosaurs left fossils behind, why has no one ever discovered a dragon fossil?
I was delighted to share that story with my grandson too
Perhaps dragons are harder to find than dinosaurs.
Or perhaps they’re still here — hidden in driftwood shapes, rocky cliffs, and the imagination of anyone curious enough to look.
Be open to wonder as you wander through the world with a child.
Nature holds both obvious and mysterious treasures.
Next time you walk along a shoreline or forest path, take a closer look at the shapes around you.
You never know what creatures might be hiding in plain sight.