House Faeries in Rhode Island

Often we learn from the experiences of others, and sometimes we can only learn from the experiences of others. Most people have no direct knowledge, no interaction with house faeries. So, I'll take this opportunity to tell you a bit about them. Be open-minded. Yes, house faeries. Read on, and I'll tell you how I came to know about the faeries.

Well, here's the way it happened. When I was a child, in a time before ordinary people had televisions or radios or air conditioning or fans, night-time would come, and people might sit under an electric light bulb for awhile doing nothing, but it was a time of 'early-to-bed.' Adults went to bed at about the same time as children. The parents told the children, "You don't have to go to sleep, but you do have to go to bed and be quiet." The evenings were long and quiet.

My bed was on the front porch, with fly screens separating me from the outdoors, and it was from that location that I first saw, heard, and, later, played with the faeries. Perhaps, I had these opportunities because the faeries in my house were living under crowded conditions, and here is why: some years earlier, 1938 to be exact, a great hurricane whirled through Rhode Island, the State where I later lived. The surge of water raced up Narragansett Bay and washed away half of the houses that were near the shoreline, leaving only cement steps as a reminder of the people who once lived there. The people displaced by the flooding waters moved far and wide, mostly to the City of Providence, but, of course, the faeries stayed. They just moved into the nearest house occupied by people, and that was the house into which I was born. You can just imagine them slapping each other's bottoms and laughing so hard they fell to the floor, to see a baby being born in their house. I am sure that the condition of my birth caused the house faeries to make a special claim on me that invited an intimacy not shared by many other people.

If you have an ounce of goodness in you, the faeries watch over you, steering you to the good and away from the bad. The more goodness you have, the more attentive they are. In the night, when the children and other people are in bed, and there is not much need to assist the people of the house, the faeries get busy about their own business and visit one another by traveling along paths that connect the houses. Being social creatures, they flock to the house that has the largest crowd, which was my house. What do they do when they got together you might wonder. Many things, of course, but they love to tell stories.

On many an evening, the faeries would gather on the front porch of my house, and the best storytellers would tell a story or two, and they did not mind that I was lying there listening; I'm sure they felt that they had a claim on me. Years later, I came to realize that some of the tales were told specifically for my entertainment and benefit. I'd like to tell a few of those stories here, maybe others could be entertained, too.