Once there was a little girl named Ricki.  Her name was really
Rachael, but no one called her that.  There were some woods and a
stream behind her house, and she used to go there and play.  She would
make tiny houses and furnish them for any potential elves or faeries
in her woods.

First she would pick a spot where she thought faeries lived.  It would
usually be a spot that was hard to see unless you were looking for it,
like between the roots of a big willow tree.  In fact, she'd usually
have to dig out the area a little bit.  If you had asked her about it,
she would have told you that faries are magic and they know if you're
going to look where they live, and they fill up any holes they've dug
just so you'll think they don't live there after all.  Of course, if
they fill it up with dirt, then they don't live there any more, but
they must have once, because it looks just like the spot a faerie
would want to live in.

So she'd dig out a little room.  Then she would take willow switches
and peel off the bark.  Willow bark peels off in long strips, which
makes it good for weaving.  She'd take the peeled switches, break them
off to about the height of a faerie, lay them down side by side, and
weave the bark in and out, over and under, back and forth, until she
got a flexible mat like the bamboo kind her mom sometimes used for
place mats when they were eating Chinese food.  The mat would serve as
a strong, flexible wall that she could fit to the hole.  Then she
would plaster the walls with wet clay and pack the dirt for the floor.
Sometimes, if she found an extra-specially-nice place she would make
two rooms.

Furniture came next.  She knew where there were some oak trees and
would collect acorns for their caps.  Acorn caps make particularly
nice bowls and hats.  Sometimes, she was sure, the faeries used them
for both.  She was glad that there was a red oak, because the caps
were shallow and rather flat.  (Bur oak acorns wobble far too much and
are too fuzzy for tableware.  They do make especially nice hats,
though.)  For a table she would get a chunk of shale from the
streambed.  Shale is best because it is always flat and smooth.  She
always put it flat on the ground, with small aspen leaves for the
faeries to sit on.  Ricki was sure that faeries sat on the ground
while eating, because it was obviously more fun.  For placemats she
would use silver-dollar seedpods.  The bed was inevitably a large
maple leaf wrapped around cottonwood fluff.

Next came the roof.  Usually she would make another willow-switch mat,
but sometimes there was a large piece of bark that seemed like it
would work better.  She would take great pains to camoflauge the house
when she was done, and considered it a success when she couldn't find
it the next day.

Ricki was walking home one fall evening after she had finished a
particularly nice house.  She had built it into the bank of the stream
where the shale had crumbled away under an overhanging layer of harder
rock.  There was enough space to put three rooms and a secret
passageway out along a tree root.  She had rebuilt the outer wall with
shale and clay mortar, leaving a small window into each room for light
and air.  The trail out of the woods led by a largeish rock that
looked rather like a turtle.  She had noticed the day before that some
colorful mushrooms were starting to poke up on one side and went to
check on their progress.  The mushrooms had come up in a large ring
around the stone.  They were mottled brown and white and red.

As she approached the ring of mushrooms, she heard the sound of dirt
giving way and the rock disappeared into a hole that had opened up
beneath it.  She was startled and stood there for a second or two,
staring.  Finally she heard a muffled splash and realized that the
rock must have fallen a very long way.  Ricki edged toward the hole
and looked down.  She could hear a deep gurgling sound, like the noise
the stream made.  Gradually she realized that the pitch of the water
noises was getting higher; the hole was filling up, and fast.  She
started to back away, wondering if the water would start pouring out
over the edge, but the water stopped level with the ground.

Then there was another deep sound, still liquid, but more musical.  As
it rose, Ricki's heart beat faster and faster.  She wanted to dance
and sleep at the same time.  She felt like she could feel exquisite
detail in everything around her, from the delicate branching of the
moss at her feet, to the smell of the hint of winter approaching, to
every whisp of the breeze in her hair, but the only thing she wanted
to notice was the music.  She walked slowly towards the water and
looked down.  A flickering light, now blue, now gold, now green, rose
toward her.  As it neared, she could see that the light was coming
from inside a perfectly round bubble.  There was something else
inside, too, but she couldn't see.  Finally, the bubble broke the
surface and the water pulled away to reveal a group of tiny people
standing on the surface of the water.

They were all shapes and sizes.  Some looked like thin girls with long
hair the color of mahogany and hazel eyes; others looked like fat
little men with noses as long as their arms.  Some had tails, some had
wings; a few of the men had beards.  The delicate faeries had clothes
that shimmered like dew on sipder silk.  The dark ones were draped in
hides taken from mice and moles.  The tallest of the faeries stepped
forward, a handsome man dressed in dark green and a flowing cloak.

"The Queen wishes to thank you for that architecture so masterfully
wrought at your hands.  She therefore would fain bestow upon you this
gift."  He motioned to one side and two of the uglier faeries lumbered
out with an acorn on a necklace.   Ricki was about to reach down to
take it when the two leaped up, rather like frogs, onto her shoulders.
As they were putting the necklace on her, one whispered a poem in her
ear:

"My mother reaches very high;
My mother reaches low.
If I am full of one then to
The other you can go."

They jumped back down and bowed to her, then stepped back into the
crowd.  As they did, the surface of the water began to curve up around
the group and they sank down in the same way they had come.  The water
drained out, the music faded, and the turtle rock pushed back up into
place.  Ricki looked around dazedly and remembered that it was getting
dark; she wondered why she had been looking at the rock for so long,
and ran home.