The Golden Book of Camping and Camp Crafts

We just came back from camping in one of my favorite places, Ithaca, NY.  I LOVE camping.  I love the sound of the tent zipper, I love making a campfire in the morning and coffee on the camp stove.  I love how friendly other campers are, how dirty you get, how even a trip to the bath house can be an adventure with insects and animals.

We had a skunk visit our site at 4am one morning and regular chipmunk guests. We sat around the picnic table playing cards, Henry made popcorn over the fire and one night I made a dinner of fresh tuna steaks cooked in the coals (in foil packets with onions, lemon and cilantro) and Chris and I shared a bottle of wine (and we tried to put the kids to bed in their tents early!)

We've been staying at Robert Treman State Park for about 6 years now. My parents were the ones who found it first and two summers ago we rented cabins with them for a week. The trails through the gorges and woods are just beautiful for hiking and the waterfall at Enfield Glen (where we camped) is usually open for swimming. Chris thinks it's the best swimming spot around.

(Henry climbing many many steps.)

I love this book of vintage camping instructions.  I feel like we're spoiled with our light nylon tents and sleeping bags.  This was the first year we've ever used air-mattresses in the tents and I have to admit it definitely raised the quality of sleep!  We still use tin plates and cups and real utensils (anyone who knows me knows I have a weird aversion to paper dishes) and part of family bonding time is hauling water and washing up after meals.

The Golden Book of Camping and Camping Crafts

Gordon Lynn 1959

illustrated by Ernest Kurt Barth

Carrie Hepple's Garden

Carrie Hepple's Garden

Ruth Craft

Pictures by Irene Haas 1979

I'm sad that our copy of this has a few scribble marks on the pages, but sometimes that comes with the territory of buying old used books. It was worth it to track this one down after we first read it at the library. Irene Haas (of The Maggie B. fame) has made dreamy magical pictures once again.

It's a summer evening and some kids have lost their ball over the wall into Carrie Hepple's garden. When they go to retrieve it, they brave all the rumours and talk about strange and scary Carrie Hepple. When they bump into her, she shows them around her garden and sends them home with a treat (we learned that 'hermits' are a type of cookie). I kinda picture myself as Carrie Hepple when I'm an old woman.  I've also decided to try making 'hermits'.

Also by Irene Haas: 

The Maggie B

A Summertime Song

Make Believe Summer

Make-Believe Summer: A Victorian Idyll

Fred Cody 1980

illustrations by Arthur Boyd Houghton

I think this book was such a clever idea- I wish I had thought to do something like this! Fred Cody takes the beautiful black and white illustrations by Arthur Boyd Houghton (1836-1875) and crafts a story around them. These illustrations, quintessentially Victorian, show the life of children in the English countryside. Cody writes in the introduction:

The pictures are also notable for the way the artist has entered wholeheartedly into the world of childhood. The children are seen at play, but their activity is portrayed on their own terms; they are unselfconsciously absorbed in a realm apart. The pattern for such a separate state of childhood took form in the latter half of the nineteenth century, though only among families of means. It is the way, of course, that we are accustomed to seeing children in our own time.

The story Cody crafts is about a widowed young mother who returns with her three daughters to her family in England. Told through one daughter's eyes, the girls experience change and an unfamiliar life in a country house filled with boisterous cousins. They visit the seaside, explore the woods and make friends. Meanwhile their mother falls in love with an artist (the artist who has drawn these pictures, it is later explained) and the little family is set to embark on a new phase of their lives.

The book opens with this:

Often, now that I am older and have children of my own, I take up the pictures you will see here and talk of the story they tell. And always they carry me back to a long-ago summer, which my sister Beth and I came to call our make-believe summer. I suppose I think of it in that way because it was a time between the end of one chapter in our lives and the beginning of another. It was a summer so full of wonder, of fear and strangeness, that it seems to have been not quite real- a kind of dream of fantasy.

The City-Country ABC

The City-Country ABC

Marguerite Walters

illustrated by Ib Ohlsson 1966

Here's a unique ABC book, a "turnabout" book that has "My Alphabet Walk in the Country" on one side and "My Alphabet Ride in the City" on the other. Charmingly illustrated by Ib Ohlsson, it follows a boy through the city and all the noise and people, and then a girl through the country with animals and nature all around.

Georgia Music

This book is sweet and a little bit sad.  It made for nice late afternoon reading yesterday.

Georgia Music

Helen V. Griffith

illustrated by James Stevenson 1986

I'm always drawn to James Stevenson's pictures though they're not particularly the style of illustration that I like. I think I must have had some books as a child with his illustrations, so when I see them they stir something familiar.

This story is about a little girl who stays with her grandfather in his cabin in Georgia one summer. They garden and make music and enjoy the sounds of a Southern country life. When the grandfather gets ill and has to move to Baltimore he becomes depressed and misses his old life in Georgia. But his granddaughter finds a way to make their old music, Georgia music, and lift both their spirits.

After a few days she had to get back to Baltimore, but she left the girl there with her grandfather for the whole long summer.  The old man never said how he felt about that, but he didn't seem to mind.  The girl didn't mind either.   She liked it right away.  She liked the hot garden patch with its green rows of seedlings, and she liked the little cabin that shook when the trains thundered by.  When she stopped being shy of her grandfather she liked him, too.

They would work all morning, their hoes going chink, chink up and down the rows, while a mockingbird flew from fence post to fence post flapping his wings and singing noisy songs at them.

"Sassy old bird," the man would say, and the girl would say it, too, "Sassy old bird," and they would look at each other and laugh out loud.

There was nothing wrong with their home in Baltimore, but the old man wasn't happy there.  He sat in a chair looking worried and sad, and the girl knew he was thinking of the old cabin and the garden that didn't get planted that year.

This Is London

In anticipation of the London Olympics we picked up this fun book.

This is London

Miroslav Sasek 1959

Published in 1959, I love the vintage illustrations. Our new version has been updated to correct some of the information-- like London being the largest city in the world, that title belongs to Mumbai, India now. The pages show many different landmarks and give a feel for the sights and sounds of the city.

One of these days I'll get there....