Nell Plants a Seed

Nell Plants a Tree

Anne Wynter

illustrated by Daniel Miyares 2023

 A sweet reflection of family and time passing and the nurturing of each other through nature and a hope for the future.  As a group of kids (cousins perhaps?) climb and explore a big pecan tree, we are reminded that it all started when "Nell picks up a seed" and "waters the soil" and "plants a tree".  I've always loved books like this, that center on a place and the generations that pass through it.  Both the author and illustrator share their own family remembrances at the end.

A Fairy Tale

 A uniquely sweet tale of a little girl growing up in a dingy factory town.  She meets her neighbor, Mrs. Leaf who may or may not be a fairy even though she looks like a small grey haired old woman.  The story is both magical and surprisingly sentimental.

A Fairy Tale

Tony Ross 1991

Tuck Everlasting

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

Natalie Babbitt 1999

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."

Tom's Midnight Garden Graphic Edition

 We are in the midst of a big home project which is requiring me to empty one of the bookcases in the girls' room.  It's impossible not to get distracted pulling all those wonderful books off the shelves.  I keep rediscovering treasures like this graphic version of one of my favorites. 

Tom's Midnight Garden is certainly a special book.  I'm not surprised that the illustrator Edith has re-read it many times through their life!  I prefer the original novel, but this is definitely a fun version, especially if you enjoy graphic novels (which have been growing on me).

Tom's Midnight Garden

A Graphic Adaptation

Philippa Pearce

illustrated by Edith 2018

  

Tom's Midnight Garden

Tom's Midnight Garden

Philippa Pearce

illustrated by Susan Einzig 1992

I absolutely LOVED this book.  Published in 1958, somehow it was unknown to me until Charlotte picked up a copy at the thrift store.  The cover was cheesy but the title intrigued her and you just never know what delights you might discover (L.M Boston was found this way!).

The writing and plot does, in fact, remind me a bit of Boston's Greene Knowe.  Because of his brother's measles, Tom has to spend weeks with his aunt and uncle in their very boring apartment.  But it turns out that the apartment house used to be a grand country manor and the most extraordinary thing occurs when the old grandfather clock in the lobby strikes thirteen!

     "Thirteen?  Tom's mind gave a jerk:  had it really struck thirteen?  Even mad old clocks never struck that.  He must have imagined it.  Had he not been falling asleep, or already sleeping?  But no, awake or dozing, he had counted up to thirteen.  He was sure of it.

     He was uneasy in the knowledge that this happening made some difference to him:  he could feel that in his bones.  The stillness had become an expectant one; the house seemed to hold its breath; the darkness pressed up to him, pressing him with a question:  Come on, Tom, the clock has struck thirteen- what are you going to do about it?"

What Tom finds blends magic and mystery and all the glorious adventures of childhood.  Philippa Pearce has written a story that conjures up fantasy and ghosts and that peculiar fascination with Time that always draws me in.

     "Tom was thinking about the Past, that Time made so far away.  Time had taken this Present of Hatty's and turned it into his Past.  Yet even so, here and now, for a little while, this was somehow made his Present too- his and Hatty's.  Then he remembered the grandfather clock, that measured out both his time and Hatty's, and he remembered the picture on the face."

Kickstarter- Take Your Time Loving Me

That was motherhood, thought the squire, snipping at the stalks.  Casual encounters about the garden and the house, with those on happy, secret errands.  Glint in the eye, indication of a destination, feet running, a voice calling, a group loose-knit and close-knit, running at the end of faint elastic ropes, but tied still to her navel.  

That was part of motherhood.  Other landscapes to come, unseen, the blocked, silent future that made her wince.  Ah, if she could carry this bundle of children with her into eternity, clutched to her breast, with iron arms like God's.  "But the navel strings will wear fine and break and each will go out to found its family and sow it's seed."  What is personality, where does it go?  So childish, so fundamental, so useless, so wild a question.

In Enid Bagnold's "The Squire" (my very favorite book), she writes of motherhood, birth, life, children, identity, mortality.  She muses on her changing self and her growing children.

How short a time ago was it that she had cried, "My life!  My life!  stretching her arms and her young body, fierce, alone, adventurous, - and now a mother five times!

Life was no longer altogether hers, the body already a little threadbare, worn in indescribable yet noted ways.  Since these essential acts of birth had occurred she knew that there was something in which she now aquiesced, a calm, a stoic pleasure in procession.  "To give birth, to bring up the young, to die" thought the squire, and for the first time saw her own end as endurable.  "I was solid and I was myself.  But now I am a pipe through which the generations pass."

Recently a project has been stirring with my dear friend, Margaux- an artist, and mother.  We've often talked about it over coffee at my kitchen table- what this life of motherhood means, how it feels to watch the time pass through your children, how your heart swells and breaks, and bursts with love for them.  How you are no longer the "you" you thought you were, the changes that are unavoidable.  For Margaux this reconciling will take place through a multifaceted project she is funding through Kickstarter, "Take Your Time Loving Me."

I see her project as two parts that are threaded together:  how being a mother is changing her- her life no longer being made of solitary travel and exploration (as it was when I first met her), but now an adventure of a different sort.    And with all things, that sharp twinge of the passage of time, the clutch of your throat when you realize your children are growing up.  I've mentioned it before (see Roxaboxen, Someday, How Does It Feel to be Old) but I wonder do we ever get over that feeling?  Even my husband, who is hardly the emotional, self-reflective type, will get melancholy when he realizes how our teenagers are reaching closer to adulthood and sliding away from being children.  When you become a parent time starts to pass at break-neck speed!  Years ago at my father-in-law's retirement party, his 90 year old mother was there and I couldn't help but imagine what it would be like to see your son grown, retired, and with grandchildren of his own.    

Please consider supporting Margaux's project as she fleshes out these thoughts and experiences.  She has made some beautiful donation rewards that capture the sentiments of her project. 

How Does It Feel to Be Old?

I asked Chris today what makes him feel older- his birthday, or New Years.  He said "New Year's" because everyone is celebrating and it's another year passing for everyone, while on your birthday it's just a year passing for you (and you can ignore it if you want to!).

I often think about growing old.  Madeleine and I even joke about how I was meant to be a grandmother.  Maybe that's why these books about time passing and aging always hit me in my chest (I'm looking at you Roxaboxen and Someday).  So of course I love this book in that heart-clenching way. 

How Does It Feel To Be Old?

Norma Farber

illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman 1979

Trina Schart Hyman's pictures are perfect as usual. "How does it feel to be old"? A grandmother answers that question in funny, frank, and nostalgic ways, sharing her life and memories with her granddaughter.

There's more to an old, old woman than what appears.  There's all that she's been before.  Before and after, both.

And only barely recalling the youngster who long, long ago was me with never a hint of a fear of falling.

Grandpa Green

My father-in-law recently passed on a bunch of family pictures that had been saved on a CD.  So I spent an afternoon scrolling through them and watching the history of my husband's family unfold.  There was his great grandmother as a young woman at the turn of the century, his 95 year old grandma as a plump baby.  The pictures changed from black and white to the washed out colors of the 50's and 60's.  I watched as toddlers grew to adolescents and long-limbed gawky teenagers became brides and grooms.  Then my husband and his brother appeared as bowl-haired towheads, and my mother-in law was so young and pretty. 

The family business celebrated 50 years, there were grandchildren, then great-grandchildren, and faces who disappeared from the pictures all together.  Eventually my skinny 20 year old self appeared with baby Madeleine next to that young blue-eyed man I fell in love with.  I could look at these pictures a dozen times a day and lose myself in the stories and nostalgia, the history of a family that I am now a part of and that my children are tied to.  I can't help but think of our own family photographs- Disney World, birthday parties, camping trips, that will continue this line of snapshots for the children's children and so on and so on...

Grandpa Green

Jane Smith 2011

In Grandpa Green a young boy relates the memories his grandfather tells him.  The images are cleverly related in the topiary.  It's one of those books (like Someday and Roxaboxen) that clutch my heart.

Someday

     You know a book is a keeper when you start to get choked up while just reading it in the isle of the store! I had recently had Charlotte and was in the unique position of experiencing a new baby while my oldest daughter, Madeleine, was on the cusp of womanhood. Holding Charlotte, I remembered baby Madeleine and knew what it felt like to blink and have your child be nearly grown.
 

Someday

Alison McGhee 2007

pictures by Peter Reynolds

     This book, so simply written and illustrated, captures that mother-feeling of loving a child, watching them grow, the dreams you have for them, and the passage of time. 

When I found this book I had to buy several copies to send to friends and (of course!) my mom. I think it's interesting that each of us is affected by a different part or line of the story. For me having daughters it was particularly poignant knowing (or hoping) that my own girls will someday become mothers themselves.  So this page was the one that did me in:

Someday I will watch you brushing your child's hair.

Someday, a long time from now, your own hair will glow silver in the sun.  And when that day comes, love, you will remember me.

When my grandmom was in a nursing home at the close of her life (nearly 80 years old), she would talk about her own mother.  Here she had been a wife, had her own children, raised a family, endured trials, had strength and at this time, old and grey haired, it was her mother that she thought of.