A month ago, I was sitting at my desk preparing for school when I suddenly heard this tiny piano play. It's a little wooden piano in my daughter's dollhouse, and there's a music box inside that plays "Fur Elise" if you wind it.

There being a window between my office and the greenhouse, I promptly stuck out my head. There was the dollhouse, all in perfect order. I was alone, my daughter being with her mother, and my partner away in Germany. Not even the dog was inside.

"Magic," I thought. I quickly texted my ex-wife, who informed my daughter. "It must be Abigail," my daughter wrote, "She's the one in the blue dress with the purple apron." So, you'll see from the photo, she is.

The very next day I heard the same thing. I won't lie, I occasionally light candles there when my daughter is away in order to honor her and the "fairies". I figured this was, perhaps, their response.

My daughter returned that evening, we began school the next morning, and I thought no more of it.

The next weekend, I was sitting there getting ready for school, when I'll be darned - there's the music again. Out goes my head. Everything's in order. Nothing changed. And I sit back down. "Amusing," I thought, though I refrained from texting this time.

The music came again the next day.

But life goes on. My daughter returned, we go back to class (outside - which is relevant) and I forget.

Truth be told, we have about a dozen fairies living in different parts of the property, some inside, some out, and several of them have been planted there by none other than yours truly. Often made by my partner Silke, I've seen their insides. They couldn't play a piano for anything, not to mention their hands are usually balls not fingers.

Then I heard it again today. This time I ran out to the greenhouse. Frivolous as I'm pretending to be, I'm deeply in love with the scientific method and an observation of this repetition is worth noting. I had already begun to suspect the temperature change had something to do with it, and now I saw quite clearly (and you can see in the photo), that the sun was directly encroaching on the little piano.

As it heats, I presume the expansion of the metal mechanism in the music box causes it to slip a rotation or two - just enough to play a verse. It must do this everyday, or nearly so. The temperature flux is extreme in the greenhouse midwinter, quite cold at night but scorching midday. In other words, it's science not magic.

But Aha! That's the trap I set. Like me, you may find yourself taking a stand on one side or the other - magicians on the left, scientists on the right.

I find there's little need for me to distinguish between them these days. Both fill me with wonder - for my daughter, her dolls, and my partner. The wood, the metal, the movement of heat, and the expansion of chemistry. The stories we tell. Those tiny pings from the music box, begging me the question - whereupon do I rest my truth?

Magic isn't something that turns lead into gold. It's the way we transform how we feel inside. That magic is as palpable and real as anything, as embodied as the dolls and fairies of my daughter, as visceral as the movement of my head through the window, the memories, leaps, and questions within.