The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.
Tuck Everlasting is one of my very favorite books and I love to read the beginning of it at the start of August. The story is so beautiful and sweet, part coming of age, part a little love story, with just enough mystery and magic and melancholy to make it haunting. The movie version is wonderful too. It ages up the characters to make it more of a love story but much of the dialog is right from the book and the costumes and scenery are so pretty.
One summer ten year old Winnie, meets a curious family, a family who has the mystical distinction of possessing eternal life. As she spends more time with them, she learns what it means to grow up, to be part of a community, to be part of the larger circle of life. The patriarch Tuck imparts his wisdom,
"Know what happens then?" said Tuck. "To the water? The sun sucks some of it up right out of the ocean and carries it back in clouds, and then it rains, and the rain falls into the stream, and the stream keeps moving on, taking it all back again. It's a wheel, Winnie. Everything's a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That's the way it's supposed to be. That's the way it is."
It might seem like heavy stuff for a young adult/children's book, but Babbitt writes so beautifully and profoundly that it's hard not to love it.
Winnie blinked, and all at once her mind was drowned with understanding of what he was saying. For she- yes, even she- would go out of the world willy-nilly someday. Just go out, like the flame of a candle, and no use protesting. It was a certainty. She would try very hard not to think of it, but sometimes, as now, it would be forced upon her. She raged against it, helpless and insulted, and blurted at last, "I don't want to die."
"No," said Tuck calmly. "Not now. Your time's not now. But dying's part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can't pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that's the blessing."
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