This was one of the first Fairly Tales I ever wrote, probably 20 years ago.  Back then, everybody had land line phones, and so Stephanie put on her dancing shoes and tapped the neighbors’ phone line, and got into trouble.  When I began to revisit the stories and to rewrite them for the grandchildren, I thought that this story was so out-dated that I could never use it.  Then, as Stephanie was climbing into the fisherman’s truck to get his glasses, I got an idea.  Enjoy!

Once upon a time, there was a fairly named Stephanie who hated to write letters.  I’m not talking about letters like A, B, or C; I’m talking about friendly letters.  (I guess U and I are friendly letters, but that’s still not what I’m talking about.)  To put it plainly, Stephanie hated to write thank-you letters.

Stephanie’s mother was a New World fairy who believed that everyone should, in a manner of speaking, be polite.  She taught Stephanie to say please, thank you, you’re welcome, and excuse me.  She taught her not to talk with food in her mouth, and not to shake the rain off her wings in the house.  But when it came to writing thank you notes, teaching Stephanie was like trying to teach Mr. Grumpyface.

“How would you like it if you sent someone a gift and they didn’t send you a thank-you note?” her mother asked her when Stephanie complained for the umpteenth time.

“I wouldn’t care,” Stephanie responded.  “Winston never wrote me a letter thanking me for the hot pads I wove for him, and it doesn’t bother me a bit.  Winston was her twin brother—a leprefaun—who lived with their father in Ireland.

“That’s different,” her mother would say.  “Leprechauns like your father can’t write, so you can’t expect Winston to know how, either.  Besides, leprechauns have such notoriously bad manners that they wouldn’t write even if they could.  Fairies, on the other hand, always teach their children to do things nicely and politely.  And that, my child,” she said, “means that you need to write some thank-you notes.”

Now, maybe you don’t know it, but, for fairlies, gifts are not just given at Christmas or Easter.  Presents are in order for Groundhog’s Day, May Day, June Afternoon, Lewis Carroll’s Birthday,  the 4th of July, the 5th of August, all of September (which was National Imaginary Beings Month), and many other occasions.  And don’t forget birthdays!  Stephanie was growing so fast that she was having several birthdays each year.  In fact, while she was 8 at the beginning of this story, she may already be 9 and could be 13 next year.  Can you imagine how many presents that means?  Can you imagine how many thank-you notes that means?  Stephanie didn’t have to imagine it; she got cramps in her hand just thinking about it.

The problem came up on Flounder’s Day, which everyone celebrated by giving gifts.  Grammie knew how much Stephanie liked perfume, so she sent her a card with a few scents in it.  Her friend Joshua had sent her a royal caterpillar that was going to change into a monarch butterfly.  Fallon the Fairy gave her a pixie stick, and Stephanie’s mother gave her a gift-wrapped exercise wheel for her pet grubs.  But her favorite presents were from her father and Winston in Ireland.  Her Irish watch was broken, so her father sent her a new Irish spring; and Winston had mailed her an autographed picture of St. Patrick.  Stephanie loved the gifts, but dreaded the idea that she was going to have to write all those thank-you notes.

And then Stephanie thought of a brilliant solution.  “Mom,” she started hopefully, “now that we have a telephone, how about I just call everyone to thank them for my presents?  That’s what Dawson and Emilie get to do.” 

Stephanie had “found” a telephone in a fisherman’s truck, and had brought it home to play with.  Her mother had taken it away from her, and told her what it was and how it worked.  From the way she described it, Stephanie thought it must have come from a jail, since she called it a cell phone and talked about it having bars.  But then her mother said something about finding and taking things that weren’t really lost, and she called it stealing, or ironing, or something like that. 

Stephanie’s mother was not happy with her idea to use the phone instead of writing her letters.  “Young lady,” she said gruffly, “I told you that we were not going to use that phone except in an emergency.  Now sit down and get to work”.

A little later, while Stephanie sat at the table still thinking about how much she hated thank-you notes, her mother came through the kitchen, putting on her jacket.  “You keep working on those letters while I go and try to cheer up Mrs. Possum, if I can,” she said.

“Is she sick?  I could go with you,” Stephanie offered, hopefully.

“No, it’s just that every time she asks her new husband to do something, he pretends to be asleep.  I want to reassure her that that is normal behavior—even leprechauns and bigginses do the same thing.  You stay here and get those thank-you’s done.”  And she went out the door.

Stephanie pouted for a few minutes, and then decided that she was so sick of writing letters that it had become an emergency.  She knew where her mother had hidden a list of telephone numbers “in case of emergency,” and since she had already determined that this was an emergency, she got the list off the refrigerator where it was hidden under a picture of Uncle Jeremy.  And she got the phone and started working down the list.

She called her grandmother first.  After she figured out how to touch the right places on the telephone screen, she got through and left a message on Grammie’s answering machine.  “One down, and so far, so good,” she said, proudly.

But then Stephanie began to run into problems.  After several tries at calling Ireland direct, she had to stop and ask the directory assistants for help.  They offered to put the call through for her, and Stephanie waited nervously while the phone beeped, chirped, and clicked, until finally she heard it ringing on the other end. 

She had been away from her father so long that she didn’t even remembered what his voice sounded like.  While she waited for him to answer the phone, she imagined that he would sound a little like Grandpa, and would answer with a cheerful, “Top o’ the mornin’ to you!”

But she decided that she must have gotten the wrong number when somebody picked up the phone and shouted, “Who be callin’ me in the middle of me dinner?” and then the phone in Stephanie’s hand beeped three times and turned itself off.  And that was the end of Stephanie’s calling for that day, or any day for a long, long time.

Her mother came home, and after she let Stephanie off the time-out seat, she explained that they didn’t have a charger for the phone, and that even if they did have a charger, they didn’t have any electricity to plug it into.  And that meant that they would never be able to use the phone again, even in a real emergency.

After Stephanie had finished writing all her thank-you notes, she cuddled up with her mother and talked to her about her very short call to her father.  “I wanted to talk to my dad, but whoever answered sounded like a cross between a billy goat and a grizzly bear,” she said. 

Her mother smiled and said, “That’s your father.  I fell in love with him the first time I heard that wonderful voice—and now you’ve heard him and will have a wonderful memory.”  Stephanie looked at her mother and wondered if maybe she had been drinking a little too much Mountain Dew.  But she decided to look on the bright side.

“And to think,” she told her mother, “I will have that special memory all because I didn’t want to write thank-you letters.  It must be a sign.”

Her mother just shook her head and sighed.  As much as she wanted Stephanie to grow up to be a good fairy, deep down she knew that the leprechaun in her made that fairly unlikely.

And next time, if the elephant stays out of the refrigerator and the cream doesn’t beat it, I’ll try to tell you How Stephanie Got a Poppa.

If you are new to the Fairly Tales, I suggest you click on that category above and read the stories in order from earliest to most recent.  About a week before I post them here, I send each story to my daughters and son to read to the grandchildren.  If you pay close attention, you will find references in every story to the grandchildren and other people they know.  The sugar bush and the rest of the setting is real and located near where I grew up.  Stephanie is unreal, in more ways than one.

Stephanie and the Fisherman

Once upon a time, there was a fairly named Stephanie who was fairly curious.  She had never heard the old expression that “Curiosity killed the cat,” which is pretty violent for an old expression, but is quite fitting for someone who lives in the Catskill Mountains.  Good thing Tigger and Grandma and Grandpa’s cats don’t live there!

She was curious about many things, but mostly Stephanie was curious about bigginses.  She knew that they didn’t make good pets (and that’s why she had a grub farm instead).  And she knew they lived in square houses out in the open, instead of in round houses under maple trees.  She knew that when the apples in the old orchard got ripe and fell off the trees, bigginses might come and pick up the drops.  (Stephanie liked to get her drops from the spring; it made the apples juicier.)  And, of course, the bigginses would come to the sugar bush in late winter to tap the maple trees.  It made quite a noise, and Stephanie had to stay inside while they were setting up or emptying their buckets; but it was better to do that than to be a sap.

And starting around April Fool’s Day every year, some bigginses would come to the babbling brook to try to catch some fish.  (There weren’t any big lakes nearby like where Emilie and Dawson and their Mom and Dad catch their fish.)  They called it “fishing”, but Stephanie thought it probably should be called, “getting wet” or “standing around with a stick in your hand”.  And Stephanie knew that she should always stay out of sight when the bigginses were around, but, as I said, Stephanie was fairly curious….

So one day Stephanie went for a walk down by the babbling brook.  She thought about trying to bounce a flat stone across the water, but decided to skip it.  Then she saw a fisherman, and got very still.  He looked old, wearing a hat and boots, and he had a long, bendy stick in his hand, and was waving it back and forth over the water as if he were trying to do a magic trick.  Stephanie guessed that it was working:  magically, all the fish disappeared.

But after watching the fisherman for a few minutes, Stephanie noticed that he had an old metal box that looked like it had been tackled more than once.  The cover was open, and there was an amazing collection of colorful items inside.  There was a knife, and several spoons, but no fork.  There were rubber worms, and plastic worms, and gummy worms—in case the old man got hungry, she decided.  (She knew that she and her friend Joshua loved gummy worms.)  But the most interesting things were in a little tray right on top:  a collection of dead bugs.

There were blue bugs, and red bugs, and fuzzy bugs and bugs with wings.  Actually, she saw, they weren’t dead bugs–they were fake flies, and they all had a sharp metal hook running right through their fake little hearts.

She crept nearer to get a good look, and was standing over the box of flies when she saw the fisherman turn toward her.  She made herself very small and lay down in the box to hide.  Now, maybe you didn’t know that fairlies could make themselves small; but since they are mostly air and imagination, when you squeeze those things out, what’s left isn’t very big.  So Stephanie squeezed herself very tiny and hid in the box.

“Oh, where are my glasses?” muttered the old biggins as he struggled to unfasten a fake fly from the string on his long fishing pole.  He stopped and patted his pockets, then frowned and said, “I must have left them in the truck,” and went back to squinting and struggling and finally getting the wet fly off the line.  “Ouch!” he said as he stuck the tip of the sharp hook into his thumb, and then popped the thumb into his mouth for a moment.  Stephanie thought only baby bigginses did that.

He dropped the bug into the box right next to where the fairly was lying very still, and said, “Which one should I try next?  Hmm…that looks like a good one,” and he reached down and started to pick up Stephanie gently between two fingers!  She was very, very scared, but as he lifted her out of the box she grabbed the fuzzy bug she had been lying on and hugged it tightly.

“Seems a little heavier than most, but maybe that’s what I need today,” the fisherman mumbled and proceeded to thread his line through the hook, being careful not to squeeze too hard so he wouldn’t hurt the fly–which was fairly lucky for Stephanie! She was still very, very scared, but she stayed quiet and did her best not to cry.  She didn’t like it when the biggins was touching her, and was relieved when he let go of her.  But that was when her trouble just began.

She dropped a couple of feet straight down—and then was jerked up over the fisherman’s head.  She hung on to her phony fly as tightly as she could as the biggins flicked his stick backwards, then snapped it forward, and then jerked it backwards, and then sent it flying forward toward the water.  Stephanie was terrified, then a little sick (like Grammie gets on rides at the Fair), then terrified again; but before she could feel sick again, she landed on the water with a little splash and decided to let go.  The fake bug started to fly like a real bug back toward the fisherman; and the real fairly started to fly like a real stone toward the bottom of the babbling brook.

But before she had sunk even an inch, she bumped—hard!—into something racing upward.  With a thump and little splash, she bounced from the water onto a flat rock at the edge of the brook.  For just a moment, she saw Tommy the Trout jumping out of the water and snapping at the fly—but by bumping into her, he had slowed down just enough that he missed the bug with its dangerous hook!  She could see shock and wonder in his eyes when he understood how close he had come to being caught for someone’s lunch.  He swam toward her rock and blinked his eyes in surprise when he saw Stephanie and realized that she was the one he had bumped into.  (If you’ve never seen a trout blink his eyes in surprise, you should try to see it some time.)  He stopped by the edge of the rock, and Stephanie reached down and patted his nose.  “I’m sorry if I hurt your snout, Tommy.  But thank you for saving me.”

Tommy opened and closed his mouth, and thanked her for saving him from the fisherman’s trick—I mean, he would have thanked her if trout could talk.  Then he swished his tail and disappeared downstream.

“Well, that was a bumpy ride,” Stephanie said to herself as she stepped behind a bush, took a deep breath, and used enough imagination to get herself full-sized again.  She had no curiosity to go back and see the old biggins.   She had no curiosity to go back and check out his collection of fishing things.  She did have just enough curiosity to go in through his truck window and find his glasses and his cell phone on the seat.  (She didn’t know what a cell phone was, but it looked interesting, so she picked it up to take it home.)  She knew that the biggins would need his glasses in order to drive home, so she put them outside on the ground in front of one tire where he couldn’t miss them. 

So she went home to her house in the sugar bush, with an exciting story and a new toy.  And she was never quite as curious again—at least when bigginses were around.

Next time, as long as the brook is still babbling and the cell phones are still selling, I’ll tell you the story of Stephanie and the Fairly Bad Call.

Stephanie the fairly had a problem getting lost.  Actually, she didn’t have any problem at all getting lost; she did that really well.  I guess her problem was getting found—or rather, not getting found…..well, I hope you’re smart enough to know what I’m trying to say.

Stephanie got lost a lot.  When she wandered over to the farmer’s field to get a bucket of milkweed, she ended up in the horse barn, where she got hoarse for a week yelling for her mother.

Once she got lost on the way from her room to the front door, and she had to spend a whole day inside reading American Girls books instead of doing her chores outside—or at least, that’s what she told her mother.  Then there was the time Stephanie said she couldn’t find her way to the time-out seat and her mother made her practice sitting in it for 20 minutes to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.

The funny thing was that Stephanie never got lost going to her friends’ houses.  Whether she was visiting Fallon the Fairy, or Betty the Brownie, or Emilie the Girl Guide, or Penny the Pigeon, or any of her other playmates, she could always get to their homes—she just couldn’t find her way back.  It was almost like her brain got too full of fun to remember anything else.  My brain gets like that, sometimes; does yours?

One day, Stephanie’s mother called her into the kitchen of their home under the maple tree and told her that her father’s birthday was coming up. She said, “Stephanie, I think your father would like some four-leaf clovers.  They are green, which is his favorite color, and the four leaves would remind him of the four of us:  Dad, and you, and your brother Winston, and me.  Would you help me out by looking around and seeing if you can find any nearby?”

So Stephanie went outside and began to look for clover plants.  In about ten minutes, she returned.  (Of course, along the way she took a wrong turn and ended up at the back window instead of the front door.)

“Mom, I think we need to kick someone out of the family,” Stephanie said once she had found her way inside.

Her mother stopped what she was doing and asked, “What are you talking about?”

“I can only find clovers with three leaves, so Dad will only be able to remember three of us.  He and Winston are already there, and I am too cute to forget, so I guess that means…well, I don’t think you actually have to move away or anything, but unless we find a better plant, we may have to leave you out.”

“Oh, no—you’re stuck with me,” said her mother, hugging Stephanie fairly hard.  “I happen to know that in the front yard of that biggins house just west of here there is a patch of clover that always has lots and lots of leaves.  I’ve even seen six- and eight-leaf clovers there.  I think some angel must have put Miracle-grow on them.”  Then she frowned.  “But I’m afraid you’re going to have to go get them.  I told old Mrs. Rabbit that I’d take her for a hair cut today.”

“Couldn’t you hop over and change her appointment?”

“No, I gave her my word, so I have to keep it.”

“But Mom—you know I always get lost!”  Stephanie protested.  (She had once been in a protest contest, to see who could whine the loudest.  Billy the Banshee won and Mr. Grumpyface came in second, but Stephanie came in a close third.  Dawson might have won, but he was busy at home playing with his Legos that day.) 

“Well, you will just have to concentrate, and pay attention, and NOT get lost,” said her mother firmly.

Stephanie stomped out of the house, muttering to herself, “I DO concentrate, and I DO pay attention, and I DO get lost.”  She stomped some more, and she muttered some more, and pretty soon she didn’t know where she was.  She sat down on a stump and cried.  That did not solve the problem.

“It’s too late to pay attention, and I don’t have any money anyway, but maybe it will help if I concentrate,” she said, taking out her pirate spyglass and scanning the woods around her.  Off in the distance, she could see a wisp of smoke trailing into the sky.

“I bet that’s the biggins house where I’m supposed to look for the clover,” she said, thinking out loud.  And it didn’t take her long to get there, find the special patch of clover, and pick a whole bunch of 4-leaf presents for her father.  But then, she had to find her way back home.  And she remembered that she was lost.

“Maybe if I talk to myself, I can tell me where to go,” she said, fairly convincingly.

“All right,” she answered herself.  “I’m standing in front of the biggins house.  The house is in front of me, and the woods are behind me.  Which way should I go?”

“Toward the forest, I would,” said the Stephanie inside her head.  So she went that way.

Once she got into the trees, she remembered that her house was under a maple tree, with oak trees nearby.  “I need to look for oak and maple trees,” she said.  “But first, I need to learn how to figure out the difference between an oak tree and a maple tree.  I know it has something to do with their bark, but they all sound the same to me.”  (It’s a good thing she didn’t have to try to figure out dogwood.  A Manchester Terrier would sound different than a Rottweiler would.)

She saw a chipmunk and thought he could tell her how to find her tree house.  But even though she was leaning English, and a little French, and some Tlingit (in case she ever visited the Yukon), she hadn’t learned how to speak chipmunk yet.  She tried asking him directions in French, but he just looked at her, so she gave up.  If Joshua had been there, he could have helped her, because he knows a lot about tree houses.  (But he doesn’t speak French either, so she would have had to ask him in English.)

“It should be easy to get home,” she decided, and walked downhill because that was the easiest way.  When she came to a brook, she was fairly puzzled.

“Is my house on this side of the brook, or on the other side?” she wondered.  She couldn’t find a toad stool, so she sat on a frog stool to figure out her situation.

“If I’m on the other side of the brook, then that would mean that I crossed it already, and my feet would be wet,” she decided, and looked at them.  They were dry.  “I think I’m being pretty smart for a fairly.”

“Don’t start bragging.  You’re still lost, you know,” she scolded herself.

“Don’t remind me,” she said.  Then she thought for another moment and realized that, when she was lost, it was actually hard to get home, so she should go uphill, since that was hard.

So she went uphill, and when she came to a deer trail she turned right, which was good, because right was right and left was wrong.  And soon the trail became very dear to her as it led her back to the sugar bush, where she could see her maple tree.  She even got out her pirate spyglass and concentrated herself right up to her front porch.

Her mother arrived home just as Stephanie stepped up to the door, and spoke to her with a smile in her voice.  “Oh, you found the four-leaf clovers, and found your way back!  I’m so proud of you!”  And she gave her a big hug.  Stephanie was going to tell her that she had really gotten lost, but then the Stephanie in her head told her to shut up and just be proud of herself.  And so she was.

And as long as the drum doesn’t beat it and the trees don’t leave, then next time I’ll tell you about Stephanie and the Fisherman.

Once upon a time there was a fairly named Stephanie who couldn’t see why her mother wouldn’t let her have a pet.  She kept dropping hints, but her mother wouldn’t pick them up.  It was so annoying—and all over a little thing like a pet biggins.

Stephanie’s mother was a New World fairy who married an Irish leprechaun and had two children:  Stephanie the fairly, and her twin brother Winston, the leprefaun.  Winston stayed with his father when Stephanie and her mother returned home to the sugar bush in the Catskill Mountains.  Though Stephanie had not seen either her father or her brother since she was a baby, with her mother’s help she had begun writing to them fairly often.

The last letter she got from them was all about Winston’s pet gremlin.  He had caught it himself in the alley behind their house, and he kept it in an old holey water bottle that the priest had thrown out.  People came from all over Ireland to see the bottled gremlin, and they paid what amounted to a dollar apiece to see his strange pet!  A picture of Winston with the gremlin had even appeared in the Weakly Reader, a school newspaper for slow students.

Stephanie had always wanted a pet, and everybody she knew seemed to have one.  Grammie and Poppa had cats and a dog!  Emilie and Dawson had fish and sea monkeys, though why they were called sea monkeys is anyone’s guess, since they weren’t monkeys and you could hardly see them.  Joshua beat them all with a cat, some goldfish, and a bunch of angry birds. (The birds might have been happy birds, except that somebody kept stealing their eggs.  That would make me mad, too–if I had eggs, I mean.)

Stephanie wanted something that would coo when she talked to it and wiggle when she tickled it, but pigeons and snakes and all the other creatures who lived around the sugar bush were friends, and she certainly couldn’t keep one of those as a pet. That was when she decided that she ought to have a pet biggins.

When Stephanie first mentioned getting a pet, her mother suggested that grubs made good, quiet pets.  Stephanie thought the door to a pet might be open (though grubs never entered her mind.)  So she began to make other suggestions to try to wear her mother down to the point where she might allow a biggins in the house.

She mentioned Fallon the Fairy, who had a starfish, but her mother said they didn’t have enough space for a starfish.  Then she brought up Betty the Brownie, who had saved a sand dollar at the beach, but her mother said it didn’t make sense as a pet.  So Stephanie said, “How about a biggins?”

For those who don’t know, a biggins is like a fairy, but much larger, and without wings, and they live in houses instead of holes under maple trees.  They like to wear lots of clothes and eat lots of food and play lots of computer games.  You are probably a biggins yourself, though you might want me to call you a human instead.  (Unless you are one of my space alien readers, in which case you will have to let me know what you want me to call you.)

For days Stephanie continued to pester her mother with little hints:  “We wouldn’t have slept so late if we had a biggins in the house,” or “I bet I wouldn’t be bored right now if I had a baby biggins to play with.”  Her mother did her best to ignore the comments until one day when Stephanie was fairly upset with her mother and said, “You know, I bet Daddy would let me have a pet biggins if he were here.”  That got her mother’s attention.

“Come with me, young lady,” she said.  “It’s time we had a talk.”  She walked away very quickly, and Stephanie rushed after her, glad that her mother wasn’t flying or she never would have been able to stay up with her.  They went out through the sugar bush, past the old orchard, through fields and woods until they came to a house.  Stephanie’s mother went behind the garage.

On the back side of the run-down building, among the thistles and weeds, were piles of old lumber, broken furniture, and such things, and her mother looked around until she found a wooden box with screens on all the sides and a door in one end.  It was mostly broken, but Stephanie could tell that once it had been a cage.  It had the name “Jaimie” carved into the top of the door.

“You’ve caught my attention,” said the fairly to her mother.  “What’s this all about?”  Her mother sat on the edge of the box and motioned for Stephanie to sit beside her.

“Once upon a time, when I was little like you, I had friends who lived in the woods here and I used to come and play with them.  I think I’ve told you about them–the Sprite sisters, Lemon and Lime?  They had a brother, too.  His name was Pepper, and he became a doctor.  Anyway, one night we were all out playing with the fireflies when two little bigginses came along.  They had nets and jars, and they caught me along with a firefly that didn’t fly.  (He wasn’t too bright.)

“When the bigginses saw that I wasn’t a bug, they put me in this old rabbit cage and kept me locked up for almost a week.  They fed me grass and called me their pet, and sometimes they took me out to play with me.  The boy biggins said he was going to pull my wings off, but his sister punched him and told him no.”  (Now, I don’t want any of you girls getting any ideas about punching your brothers.  It’s never right to do unless he’s about to tear the wings off a fairy.)

“But then one day they took me to the house to show me to the bigger bigginses.  When their mother saw me, she took me out of the cage, and held me gently, and talked quietly to me.  Then she told her children about fairies, and how happy they are when they can run and fly around, and how sad they are when they are caught.  She also told them that fairies didn’t eat grass, and that it was really hard to find fairy food.  (I didn’t tell them that I like pizza without cheese, French fries and bannock; they didn’t need to know that.)

“Then their mother told them, ‘Fairies are people, too.  Treat them the way you would like to be treated.’  And she said that people don’t put other people in cages or keep them locked up, and then she sent the little bigginses to their rooms and told them to close their doors and not to come out until they were ready to stop being Mr. and Miss Grumpyface.  Finally, she set me outside in the flower box.  ‘Good-bye, little fairy,’ she said.  ‘Be happy and be free.’  And she turned and walked away.

“Well, that’s just about the end of my story.  The Sprite sisters had called my Pop, and he came and helped me get home, and we all lived happily ever after.  And then a few years later my daughter wanted to catch a baby biggins and keep it as a pet.  What do you suppose I should tell her?”  And Stephanie’s mother paused for an answer.

“I guess ‘Go ahead’ is out of the question, huh,” said Stephanie, doing a fairly good imitation of Miss Grumpyface.

“Bigginses are people, too.  Treat them the way you would like to be treated.”

Stephanie walked home with her mother, disappointed in a way, but understanding the lesson fairly well.  And the next day she got the address from her mother and ordered a kit to start her own grub farm.

And if the caribou don’t boo and the mooses don’t moo, then next time I will tell you the story about how Stephanie Gets Fairly Lost.