I suppose this is most easily described as a story for children, though I am not sure who told it to my children, and it was my children who told it to me.  It’s also not really a story, since there is not a plot, as such.  Maybe if you ask your children, they will know something about it, and you can fill in some of the missing parts.

There is a fey princess in Finn Faerie Land named Mary Katroux.  I don’t know if I’m spelling the name right, because it was told to me by a three-year-old and a four-year-old, neither of whom are particularly insistent on the finer points of spelling, though they are Quite Adamant about details.  They’re much more insistent, in fact, about the details of Finn Faerie Land than they are on the particulars of what happened or didn’t happen, which is somewhat different than the kind of stories I’ve grown accustomed to (which is part of why I mentioned before that this is not necessarily a story).

In fact, there are a few things about Finn Faerie Land that are quite different than I’ve grown accustomed to.  For instance, there is a frog from Finn Faerie Land who lives in a magnolia tree with a hollow spot in it.  The frog’s name is Finnbell, and he is no particular color.  He is no particular kind of frog.  And he is not even really a he, because sometimes she is a she, depending upon what she is occupied with, and she is no particular gender of frog.  I’m told this is not a particularly unusual characteristic in frogs, but it still seemed strange to me when I first encountered Finnbell.

Finnbell’s house, it should be noted, is one of the in-between places that the children call Faerie Houses.  Once on our way down to Indian Run, the children saw such a house without a door, and insisted that we make one and bring it back, since in this particular case, it was surely a mistake.  Sometimes when we go by that place now, the door is open.  Other times, it is closed.  It appears the yard is quite well tended, and we found a stag-horn nearby too, which may have been left there by the Piebald Deer.

The Piebald Deer, like Finnbell, is one of the in-betweens, who can be seen quite plainly when sampling delicious plums from our plum tree, if one is patient enough to wait, and lucky enough to be waiting at a time when the Piebald Deer has a sweet tooth.  The Piebald Deer is also friends with Bernie-the-real-dog, who is usually the one that notices that piebald rump hopping into the trees.  Bernie gives chase, but only in good fun- there is no animosity.

Last, but not least, and not really last, are the Kitsune.  At first I thought they were just foxes, but I guess that is part of the magic of the Kitsune, that most people think they are just mangy red dogs who hang around waiting for a chicken to come outside the fence.  Kirby-the-real-dog tolerates the Kitsune, but Bernie-the-real-dog does not like them at all.  Too much hound in that one to be friends with something that looks that much like a fox.

The Kitsune, interestingly enough, also live in faerie houses, usually down at the bottom of a tree.  You can tell a faerie house with Kitsune living in it, because they dig out the door a little bit.  We found one yesterday that had dug down so much that the tree fell over, but it looked like the Kitsune decided to stay anyhow.  We planted a cherry tree only to learn that it is one of the favorite foods of the Kitsune, at least according to Basho, according to Tim Myers.

One difficulty about this not really being a story is that it becomes difficult to know where to stop.  One stops a story at the end, or when the story has a natural pause, but from what I can tell one only stops telling about Finn Faerie Land when something else grabs one’s attention.  Which has happened to me now.