When Eileen Haun’s items slowly started to disappear from her porch, she didn’t know who — or what — was responsible.
One morning at 2 a.m., Haun stood in her doorway, looking to catch a glimpse of the mysterious porch burglar. That’s when she saw it: a baby fox.
Haun realized that the culprit of her missing shoes and gardening gloves was none other than a family of foxes living right below her deck. But instead of feeling frustrated by the foxes borrowing her belongings, Haun says she was touched by the experience and told her husband she was going to write about it.
So she wrote a rhyming poem about the “little fox” and got together with her granddaughter, Madeline Fazio, who planned to do the illustrations for the local duo’s first-ever children’s book: “A Little Fox and Me,” or “Una Zorrita y Yo” (the book is also in Spanish).
“I had never done such a committed project before,” Fazio says. “I do lots of art, but to do something like this, where I have to do so many consistent pictures, was definitely a challenge. It took me a long time, but I learned a lot.”