“James, I want you to make me a fairy house on your lathe,” Marjorie said.

“What does a fairy house look like?” I asked, whereupon she quickly sketched something that looked like a mushroom with a little door.

So it was that I began building fairy houses.  I made her mushroom, hollowed it out, cut and hinged a little door, and added a bent carriage bolt coming out the roof for a chimney.

She was so pleased with the result that several days later I turned another, more elegant fairy house on my lathe.  This one had a carriage bolt chimney coming out of a clapboard roof.  It also had a window, a little woodpile, and a wheelbarrow made out of a walnut shell and bent wire.  I installed the house on the stump of an old plum tree in our orchard, and let her discover it.  She was so delighted that she wouldn’t permit it to stay outside where it might get rained on.

“What I want now is one with a shingle roof made out of the scales off a pine cone,” she said wishfully.

So back to the lathe I went.  But before I finished house number three I became aware of a neighbor’s genuine housing problem.  A little wren flew into the shop.  I herded her out, but the next time I went in the shop, there she was again.  She was looking for a place to nest.

As I’d been mowing the lawn two days earlier I noted with satisfaction that a little wren was perched on top of the wren house I’d hung in the apple tree.  I was pleased that I was going to have a tenant.  In all likelihood that little wren had been hatched in that very house just a year or two earlier.

I was somewhat saddened just a few hours later to see a violet-green swallow emerge from that very house.  The swallow had either beat the wren to the house, or had evicted her.

For the next two days I could hear the wren in the back yard.  I saw her searching the woodpile for a nesting site.  Then she was in and out of both the shop and the greenhouse whenever the doors were left open.  Little Jenny Wren wanted to nest in our yard, but her house had been taken over by a swallow, and there was no other suitable spot.  She acted desperate.

So I quit working on fairy house number three, and began numbers four and five.  I made two since the board of aspen wood that I picked up had enough material in it to make two houses.

They were simple, and took about an hour to make.  I finished one, drove a staple in the top, and used a piece of baling twine to hang it in the aspen tree in the back yard.

I finished the second house and hung it in the birch tree.  I glanced over at the first house, and there was Jenny Wren sitting on the perch in front of the entrance!  She popped into the hole, inspected the house, popped out again, and immediately began bringing twigs with which to furnish her house.  She was moving in!  She looked joyful.  She sounded joyful as she regularly stopped to sing her beautiful song.  She was probably wondering why she’d never before noticed that little house.  It was perfect, and just what she was looking for.

But she wasn’t any happier than I.  I thought that I’d been making fairy houses for little mythical creatures, and yet, here was a real one moving in.