Writing Up A Storm

If You Miss the Train . . .

These railroad tracks lie within walking distance from my house. And my house isn't out in the countryside or even in a small town ~ it's in the very middle of Austin, Texas, just north of The University of Texas. Yet here are these train tracks just a hop, skip, and a jump away from my front door, running in a long narrow pathway between trees.

I can hear the train's whistle from inside my home, and when I do, it stops me in my tracks. Or maybe it stops me in its tracks. For there is no lonesomer sound, is there, than the long, mournful cry of a train on its way from here to there.

And I wonder if this particular lonesome train song isn't a mysterious variation of the old woman under the hill who lives there still if she is not gone:

If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I am gone,
you can hear that whistle blow one hundred miles . . .

Peter, Paul, and Mary sang this, but I don't know if they wrote it, or if it goes way back to the time when the first trains began their westward-bound journeys.

Just to the left of this track is a little neighborhood of tiny bungalows and cottages and apartment complexes where university students live. And a stone's throw away on the right is I35, all one hundred lanes of it that travel day and night from its starting point in Laredo just shy of Mexico, onward through San Antonio, and then cutting a great swath right through the middle of Austin as it heads north all the way to Minnesota just shy of Canada.

But here there are only the train tracks and the trees.

When I was 24 years old, I took a train from Texas to California. I went alone, leaving from my parents' home with one brown-woven suitcase and one large blue bag with long straps that I carried over my shoulder. I didn't set out to live a vagabond life, but it would be ten long years before I finally found a way to stay in one place again.

Was it that train ride, I wonder now, that set all the rest of my wanderings in motion?

"You can hear that lonesome whistle blow one hundred miles."

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Crayon Similes & the Hole to China, Part 2

[Note: Dear Reader, in order to understand today's post, you will need to read yesterday's post first.]

On the third day of my "crayon simile" lesson, I needed to set the bar a little higher for the class. I erased both chalkboards, and asked them to write a description of our classroom, using at least three color similes. They could use their crayons if they wanted to.

But I knew that Jewel needed some kind of special magic.

Jewel's birthday was in the summer, and there had hardly been one day since school started that she had not asked me when, exactly, were we going to celebrate her birthday, with that look of glorious expectation that very young children get about their birthdays. She was that kind of little girl. To have her suddenly so upset over this new activity was heart-breaking.

We looked at her paper from the day before. Yes, she wanted the brown dog. We took it off the paper with the hole in it. Jewel patted the dog smooth again. I took out a clean piece of writing paper, but then I saw right away she wasn't ready for that yet. It was as if she had fallen through that hole in her paper from yesterday and was now very far away.

It was not that Jewel was the only one in the class who could not do yesterday's assignment or today's assignment. I needed to be right beside four or five other kids, too, right that minute. But those kids were busy, for the moment, writing descriptions without similes, or drawing pictures without words, or cleaning out their desks. They were not in tears.

Jewel was in tears. Again. The bad day from yesterday had come to school with her today.

Jewel had fallen through the hole in her paper into a very dark place.

I was in the portables so I had the luxury of having a teacher in the adjoining portable who could keep an eye on my class while Jewel and the little brown dog and I went outside.

We sat down on the bottom step of the stairway to the portable and looked at the world. If you haven't thought it about recently, I can assure you there is a great quantity of brown in the world at large. We looked at the paper dog and then we looked at the world so see if we could find a brown out there that would fit into a sentence about her dog:

The dog is as brown as ________ .

We looked at telephone poles, tree trunks, autumn leaves, the wooden steps we were sitting on. But Jewel was having none of it. She picked up a stick (a brown stick, mind you) and began continuing the hole in the paper phenomenon by digging a little hole to China right there in the ground at her feet.

Ever helpful and hopeful, I kept on enumerating brown things: sparrows, pecans, a piece of twine that was hanging from the railing, not realizing that every time I thought of another brown thing I was simply further reducing Jewel's chances of finding one all by herself.

(Honestly, sometimes I need to take myself out into the hall and give myself a good talking to.)

Jewel's hole got deeper and deeper.

I started digging a hole, too. Jewel and I dug in silence for a little tick of time.

And then I got to have that huge once in a lifetime Helen Keller-Anne Sullivan "the word for water is . . ." experience. Suddenly, Jewel lifted up her face to me with a smile brighter than the sun, and slowly unclenched her little fist so that I could see the treasure in the palm of her hand: a handful of dirt from her hole to China.

"Ms. Cates, my dog is as brown as dirt," she said, proudly. And E=mc². Eureka!

I really have no earthly idea of what happened that day, but something bigger than one little simile clicked for Jewel.

A little girl who had no idea of what a simile is came up with one all on her own anyway. And then it was as if doors in her mind that were keeping phonics in one room and reading in another room and writing in another room suddenly began to open up into each other, letting an intermingling take place that hadn't been happening before. Or maybe it was just that a little girl who wasn't ready for third grade summoned up the courage to begin to read and write at her very own pre-primer level anyway.

We went back inside and together we wrote her "dog is as brown as dirt" sentence on the new piece of paper.

But then Jewel started writing instead of drawing in her journal in the mornings, and it was obvious that all those perfectly-copied phonics lessons in her perfect penmanship had been sinking in. Her journal pages almost always started out about a brown dog and then proceeded immediately to her birthday and all her birthday wishes. She never stopped for periods. Like Faulkner, her thoughts went on and on for pages, one long sentence composed of many independent clauses all connected by "and."

Below is a sample from my memory ~ I've probably misquoted her a little:

"The big bron dog jumt on me and it is my brday and I mad a wis for a red dres and a puzl and I had a cak and thr wil be 9 candls on my cak and it is my brday sum day soon."

No child wrote as many pages in her journal as Jewel did from that time forward. No child continued to come to school every day with such a beatific smile. No child ever raised her hand so eagerly to answer questions she did not know the answer to. No child ever asked me so many times when were we going to celebrate her birthday as my sweet little Jewel.

Happy Birthday, Jewel!!

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Crayon Similes & the Hole to China, Part 1

During one of my teaching years, the writing of color similes led me straight into what I think of as "a digging a hole to China" experience. I would like to tell you what happened.

One September I introduced similes to my third-graders by using crayons. I found this to be a really fun and easy way to get a beginning idea of similes across. We used the 8 colors above that come in both large and regular sizes in 8-color packets of crayons (plus we added white and gray).

Then I brought as many things from home to match the colors as I could. For example, clockwise from the top left are mini-carrots, a potato, a very tiny iron skillet, two broccoli florets, one tomato, three plums, and a lemon.

In the middle is the one lonely blue crayon. I had nothing on hand today that is consistently blue to put with the blue crayon. Blue is a somewhat rare color in the natural world, isn't it?

But I want to tell you about what happened this one particular September when I did my "crayon simile" lesson with my class.

First we brainstormed for everything we could think of that was routinely thought of as red, yellow, brown, or green, etc. I wrote their ideas on the chalkboard, using colored chalk. We had two chalkboards and we filled up both of them. (This one above is a small 9 x 7 inch chalkboard that I have at home.) 

But back to my story.

I had a little girl by the name of Jewel in my class. Jewel was a little gem of a girl. She smiled all day long, jumped headfirst into any project, was always the first to raise her hand even when she didn't know the answer, and, in early September in third grade, she was not yet reading or writing, although she had perfect penmanship and could copy anything ~ letter-perfect.

In the mornings when the class wrote in their journals, Jewel drew pictures in hers.

I showed the children what I wanted them to do: to write down as many similes as they could using the words on the board or making up their own. They could write in crayon or pencil or both. They could draw pictures or cut pictures out of a stack of catalogs and old reading-readiness workbooks that I had at the back of the room.

Most of the words they might need were on the two chalkboards. Because I wanted them to learn about similes, I didn't want their fear of misspelling words to interfere. By third grade, some children are so anxious that each word they put on paper be "right" that they can't go forward with their thoughts if they are unsure of their spelling. I hope children nowadays are able to use creative spelling more easily than when I was teaching.

Jewel's paper looked something like this. Alas, when I was teaching, I sent all their papers home with them, and now I wish I had copies of their work to show you, but I don't. Still, I remember some things with a clarity that sometimes takes my breath away.

Jewel had very much taken to heart the idea that a simile must contain the words "as ______ as a _____" and that it needed a color in the first blank and an object that same color in the second blank. And she had all the words she needed on the chalkboards. She could find the word "Red" on her red crayon, and match it to the word "Red" on the chalkboard, and then find all the words beneath that were red objects. Her page was filled with similes from top to bottom.

But the next day I made it a little harder. 

I asked them to find a picture from the catalogs or workbooks and write one sentence describing the color of their chosen object with a color simile. I gave them an example, like the one above, to show them what I wanted.

There was a big flurry of finding the pictures, pasting them on their papers, and hunching over to write their sentences. The brainstorming words from the day before were still on the chalkboards.

Everyone went to work. Everyone except Jewel.

My sweet little Jewel could not make the leap from yesterday's lesson to today's assignment. Yesterday she had written a whole page of similes. Today she could not write one single simile, partly because she could not write a sentence in which to put it, but also because she could not go from the picture she had chosen of a dog to a simile about the dog.

Jewel had chosen a little brown dog for her picture.

She wrote her name and pasted on her picture and tried to start a sentence. And, bless her little heart, she tried and erased and tried and erased and tried and erased until she had dug a little hole right through her paper.

Then she cradled her little head in her little arms over her paper, in tears.

My sweet sparkling little Jewel was falling down a very deep dark hole. All the way to China.

To be continued tomorrow . . .

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Yonder

Yonder, by Tony Johnston, illustrated by Lloyd Bloom, is a gentle peek into the olden days and olden ways. To my way of thinking, the word "yonder" ranks right up there with the back o' beyond, vanishing point, North Pole, and the Milky Way for taking the mind to some far away and wonderful place.

Tony Johnston starts the first page by using the word "yonder" five times, and in this way she takes us immediately to some distance horizon line: "Yonder. Way over yonder."

And then she sets us right down smack in the middle of this yonder place by saying "There. Just over there." This phrase is a repeating phrase used throughout the rest of the picture book, until she brings us back again to "Yonder. Way over yonder."

With a kind of poetic magic, Tony Johnston makes "yonder" seem like "here" just for few pages of time.

The story grows up around a tree. A man comes with his bride. They plant a plum tree. They build a cabin and a barn. Children come, and the seasons come and go, too. There is one really wonderful two-page spread where the mother is sewing a patchwork quilt on the left-hand page that perfectly mirrors the father on the right-hand page who is plowing his field in front of a patchwork of land like the one show above.

The mother's quilt is a fabric painting of all those patchwork fields outside.

This is the mother from the cover of the book. I love that little button of a baby's face peeking out at us.

Tony Johnston's words cast a poetic spell, and Lloyd Bloom's illustrations have a lovely impressionistic look to them. In the springtime, the plum-tree blossoms are strewn upon the page in a hundred tiny pink and white splashes, and in winter, snow spatters everywhere, both inside the house and outside on the trees.

Soon all the children grow up. The boys are taller now than their father. A daughter gets married. A new baby is on the way, and the mother and father become grandma and grandpa. The plum tree keeps on growing. And it all takes place:

"There. Just over there."

The father gathers all the grandchildren on his lap and tells them stories. I think one of my favorite parts is that during the telling of these tales:

"Owls are listening. Bears are listening . . . There. Just over there."

The father who is now the grandpa dies and one last tree is planted for him. Such a tiny book, only 32 pages, to carry the whole story of one family, from the first bride and groom to the first children to the first grandchildren to the first death, in and out of years, and through all the seasons.

If you want an old-fashioned story with a wagon in it, a swing and a quilting frame, pigs, geese, and a goat, a wedding and a cradle, children in nightshirts, pumpkins and knitting, and the planting of a tree to say goodbye to a loved one, it's all there, just over there and way over yonder, in a beautiful children's picture book called Yonder.

It's a very "Tasha Tudor" kind of book, both in the lifestyle it portrays and in the sweet illustrations.

This book is sadly out of print (I found it in a second-hand store ~ by chance), but I do see that a few used copies are available on Amazon. I checked with the Austin Public Library and found that two copies are available in Austin, so if you live in a largish city, I hope you can find it in your library, or can receive it through an inter-library loan system if you live in a smallish city.  

I would love to know how easy or how hard it is to find a book like this where you live, and especially if you live on the other side of the world. And have a wonderful weekend, wherever you are, way over yonder or there, just over there!

Gypsy Mother and Child

This 1879 painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau ~ "Young Gypsies" ~ reminds me of a single moment, maybe ten minutes all told, in the 1960s, when I saw a young woman just my age (I was 22 on this particular day) and her baby at a gathering in Eastwoods Park along Waller Creek in Austin.

I'll call her Sylvania Manderly. I did not know her, but it was rumored that she would not marry the father of her baby, that he had left her because she would not marry him, and that she and her baby were quite alone in the world. And furthermore, she was said to be a poet.

Beyond these little bits and pieces, I knew nothing more about her at all, nor even if what I "knew" was true.

We were a curious group of young people gathered together that day: a handful of graduate students (I had just started working toward a Master's in Creative Writing) and a handful of young men who had just returned from their tour of duty in Vietnam. We were strangers who had come together because of a flyer thumbtacked to a bulletin board in some university hallway, a flyer with its own rumors of a war I barely knew was happening on the other side of the world. And one of the graduate students had grown his hair out as long as mine.

Sylvania had her baby nestled against her front in a make-shift sling (this was a very "new" way of carrying a baby back then). She was a tall gypsy-like girl with a cloud of dark hair, in a wisp of a dress, and barefoot. She wandered away from the group, slowly following a little footpath along Waller Creek.

I watched her and her baby disappear from view. I never saw them again.

She had set herself, barefoot, upon a path of her very own making. I saw her breaking away from the group as if she were the moon breaking away from her orbit around the mother earth. I had never before heard of a woman choosing to raise her child out of wedlock.

I had never before met young men just returned from combat. And I had only recently begun to see young men with long hair ~ were they trying to look like Shakespeare, I remember wondering.

Perhaps Sylvania and her baby and those young men just back from war and that long-haired graduate student were some kind of tipping point for my trying to set my own feet upon my own path. I wonder how often some chance encounter with strangers never to be seen again, some single chance sighting of an ordinary event, a mother with child walking alongside a creek, influences the whole direction of our lives.

* * *

A few years ago I saw an article in our local newspaper about something or other in which mention was made of a "Sylvania Manderly, Poetess" and that she lives now in one of those little crossroads-towns that lie all around the outside perimeter of Austin, olden towns with one little town square from which a few rays of streets wander off and disappear into the countryside.

And how I smiled to think that she was still alive and still a poet!

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The Constellation of a Baby

This is a piece of gift-wrapping paper called "Starry Night," designed by Linda Edwards, Clare Maddicott Publications, Ludlow, England. I bought two pieces of this paper about ten years ago, and I keep it under lock and key, for I want to use every last piece of it in my art work. All those stars in that Milky Way swirl of color!

Then I started Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting by Michael Perry.

Suddenly, a piece of this precious gift-wrapping paper seems like the perfect illustration for words that I found in the first chapter of Coop. Michael and his wife and their six-year-old daughter are expecting a new baby in the family. Michael's wife wants to have the baby at home with a midwife, and he is trying very hard to accept this, however much it worries him.

But then he hears the midwife Leah describe the knobby parts of the baby that you can feel through the mother's tummy (the head, the knees, the toes, etc.) as "the constellation of the baby." Later Michael finds he can't stop thinking about these words:

"But what really keeps circling my head was the phrase Leah used to describe the landmarks of our child: the constellation of baby. What a gorgeous image ~ the unborn infant afloat in the universe of mother, identifiable but unknowable."

I find these words so incredibly beautiful myself that they have been circling around in my head as well, and so I wanted to put them here for you, too.

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Below is the Constellation of the Big Dipper in the universe of the Universe.

Photograph taken by Astronaut Donald R. Pettit, NASA, 2003
(One of the stars of the handle is not in view on the far right.)
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A Guardian Gypsy

This is a brand-new version of my guardian gypsy, made from long thin strips of rags, blowing in the wind. I will show you the older version below. I kept her turban-like scarf and the wand, although here the wand has a different star.

The crystal ball is new. I had to try out several marbles to find one that would photograph well enough to use. I have a clear glass marble that looks like the perfect crystal ball but it refuses to photograph as anything that remotely resembles clear glass, so this white marble with its cloudy insides was the next best choice. This gypsy has paper hands, and I was able to fold the paper to hold the marble in place.

Her halter top is three short pieces of ribbon with three tiny bells hanging from the waistband. A red "gem" is glued to her kerchief. And I added the little pointy parts of her garment at her waist to give her an extra layer of fabric that was like an apron but not an apron.

The sleeves and bodice of her dress are cut from this fabric, which is the same fabric I used in my header for my blog. It is such a magical fabric and so very kaleidoscopic! It varies from sharp color edges to a blur of color, and seems to me to capture a kind of gypsy evanescence: now you see me, now you don't. For is that not what we think of as a special gypsy quality? The ability to disappear into who knows where right before our eyes. The kind of person who slips away before we have even managed to get their name . . .

I hope with all my heart that it is not politically-incorrect to wax romantic and poetic over gypsies!

My gypsy above isn't quite finished yet. I have laid her upon a piece of gray construction paper, and am still thinking about her. I thought my idea to make her skirt out of those strips of rags was my idea, but then I remembered where it came from.

This is a rag doll that my mother-in-law Oleta made and gave to me years ago. Isn't she the most wonderful old-fashioned doll? This is the kind of doll that children grew up with during the Depression days and back, back, back to the 1800s, in the wild west, on the prairies, in the deep south, in little hamlets in the mountains, and back before then, too.

She is made entirely of strips of rags and tied with string at her wrists, her neck, and her waist. No, wait!

Oleta, I just looked closer and the "string" is actually a tiny strip of the cloth that borders the top and bottom edge of a bolt of cloth. I don't know what that edge is called. So, anyway, she is entirely made of fabric torn into strips. No sewing, no safety pins. With a little torn triangle of cloth for her kerchief. So incredibly simple and sweet!

Here is my earlier version of a guardian gypsy. I love her, too, but she does lack that "rags blowing in the wind" quality of the new one. She has a vine of stars and I managed to keep the new crystal ball from rolling off her mittened-hand just long enough to take this photo.

I do love that very dark flowered-forest fabric. It makes me want to find a way into that forest, to push those flowering vines to one side, and step into the deep dark heart of its interior. I suppose I want to find the clearing where the gypsies are staying for the night, where their caravans are encircled around a campfire and their folksong encircles the darkness.

Anyway, I submit my gypsy guardian as a part of The Hundred Somethings Project that Tollipop started. And her idea came, in part, from this book:

The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes seems like a perfect book to put here among the gypsies, for it is about understanding people who are different from us ~ before it is too late. It is a poignant story for children, a Newbery Honor Book, 80 pages, available in paperback, and illustrated by Louis Slobodkin with such gently-colored little sketches. The back of the book says "Ages 6 to 10." (I first read this book when I was in my forties and I loved it, so I'm not sure about those ages.)

I did not use this book with my classes, but it was always on my ever-growing list of "Absolutely Wonderful Books to Read Aloud With Children." Alas, I just never got to it. Oh, if only there were time enough for everything!

Anyway, today, I give you my guardian gypsy. Here are the words I wrote for her some ten years ago:

Your guardian gypsy knows
how to foretell the most wonderful fortune for you.
She will clothe you in sparkly fabric
into which little bells have been sewn.
She will set your feet to dancing.
She will surround you with music and folksong,
bright campfires,
and the influence of the stars.
She will teach you to look into the future
with joy.
Then she will send you on your way filled with
her wisdom and mystery.
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May a guardian gypsy steal out of her flowered forest and work her magic ways upon your past, your present, and your future ~ for who knows how far the influence of the stars can reach??

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Edited to add: I just this minute realized one thing that is missing from my gypsy made of rags: there is not one single strip of a blue rag in her skirt to match the blues in her sleeves, face, hands. She needs three or four strips of blue mixed in with all those other colors. Working on it right away!

The Big Big Sea

This is an extraordinarily luminescent children's picture book, The Big Big Sea, written by Martin Waddell, illustrated by Jennifer Eachus. The very first words draw you in immediately, as if the author had reached out, taken you by the hand, and led you right down to the sea in the dark:

Mama said, "Let's go!" So we went . . .

The illustrations are done with colored pencils, although it is very hard not to feel that they are photographs, Jennifer Eachus has so completely captured this little girl, the sea, the seashore, and the moon, and other details throughout, like the mother's hands in the very last picture.

The story is told by the little girl, with only the words that she would have used herself, and every word is so sweetly simple, direct, innocent. 

Martin Waddell is pitch-perfect in putting this story into her child's voice.

"and I saw . . . THE MOON."

"I went right in to the shiny bit."
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We are told on the author/artist page that the book's setting is near Martin Waddell's home "where the mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea" in Northern Ireland.

The artist Jennifer Eachus traveled there to see what the author was writing about. She even made sure that she went when the moon was full. I am touched beyond words that the artist took the time to honor the author's words in such a wonderful way. Her illustrations are a glowing tribute.

The back cover says "Age 3 and up," but I really think it could say age 2 and up. You can read some Amazon customer reviews here. A simply beautiful book. It is a big, big sea experience in itself, but it is also a perfect bedtime picture book, too.

I hope you will give it a try! And have a lovely, big, big weekend!

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Gypsy Caravan

I spent ten years of my life living a nomadic existence, sometimes very similar to this scene, but without the horses. Maybe that's why I love this 1888 painting by Vincent van Gogh, "The Caravans - Gypsy Camp near Arles." In northern California, where I often lived, there were many hand-painted wooden houses built into the beds of pick-ups, like little traveling treehouses. I myself lived in a Volkswagen camper when I did not live in a cabin or a cottage or some little room somewhere.

Once I lived in a tall narrow house on the edge of a cliff just above the Pacific Ocean. The family who rented the house, a very gypsy kind of family with four or five kids, could no longer afford the rent. So they sublet the house for the summer to four of us who were traveling together at the time while they lived in the woods.

They took off in an old pick-up with the most fragile of shelters rigged up in the back, nothing but a handful of boards and ropes and cardboard and rags blowing in the wind.

I had a little room in their house with a window that looked into the ocean. Beneath the window was a white-painted handmade wooden crib. One side folded down, making it into a little desk. I wrote stories there every day. Sometimes I would put the flats of my hands on those crib-boards that had held their sleeping babies and watch the fogs roll in.

We left at the end of the summer, and they came back again, all those little brown bare feet running up and down the stairs and in and out of rooms. I was so happy we had been able to keep their rent house safe for their return.

I guess I've been thinking about them because I've been working on a guardian gypsy card. I'm trying to make her dress out of strips of rags blowing in the wind. So I have this little family very much on my mind. Oh, I wonder whatever happened to them?

Little Em'ly and the Houseboat

Another door into a place where there ordinarily isn't a door! Yesterday there was an old woman who lived under a hill. Today, because I found myself paging through My Book House books, which hold a treasure-trove of memories for me, I came upon this illustration of a houseboat.

I was quite taken by surprise to find this houseboat is in a whole chapter from David Copperfield! Is this where my love of Dickens first began? David has gone to Yarmouth to spend a fortnight in a house by the sea. But he cannot see any house, only an old boat "high and dry on the ground, with an iron funnel sticking out of it for a chimney and smoking very cosily."

Then he learns that this old boat is the house. Later, inside the houseboat and after tea, David (or Dickens) says:

To hear the wind getting up out at sea, to know the fog was creeping over the desolate flat outside, and to look at the fire, and think that there was no house near but this one, and this one a boat, was like enchantment.

Of course, David falls in love with Little Em'ly, they put some stranded starfish back into the water, but in the end he must leave her, promising he will write to her: "I kept that promise afterwards in letters larger than those in which apartments are usually announced as being to let." Oh, I can just see those letters, enormous on the page in his child-size rendition of the alphabet.

I found myself taken aback at how innocent Dickens is in his writing.

This little chapter is slightly abridged, but every word is so sweet, so simple, so very childlike. And yet Dickens was not writing for children; he was writing for adults.  And I cannot help but wonder if it is an improvement in literature when writers write stories for adults that are horrendously inappropriate for children to read.

I mean, is it really good for adults to read the things we read? I'm not for censorship, but I'm just wondering . . .

Anyway, it seems to me that both children and grown-ups, equally, want to open this little door into this little boat and wander around its interior:

There was a table, and a Dutch clock, and a chest of drawers, and on the chest of drawers there was a tea-tray with a painting on it of a lady with a parasol, taking a walk with a military-looking child who was trundling a hoop. The tray was kept from falling down, by a Bible, and the tray, if it had tumbled down, would have smashed a quantity of cups and saucers and a teapot.

If you love Dickens as much as I do, I have added below how in such a tiny handful of words, he invokes the whole character of Mrs. Gummidge:

It was a very cold day, with cutting blasts of wind.

Mrs. Gummidge's peculiar corner of the fireside seemed to me to be the warmest and snuggest in the place, as her chair was certainly the easiest, but it didn't suit her that day. She was constantly complaining of the cold, and of its occasioning what she called "the creeps in her back." At last, she shed tears on that subject, and said again that she was "a lone lorn creetur' and every think went contrairy with her."

"It is certainly very cold," said Peggotty. "Everybody must feel it."

"I feel it more than other people," said Mrs. Gummidge.

Ahhhhh, yes, I have known a Mrs. Gummidge or two, and honestly, there are days when I myself feel that I feel it more than other people, too, and every "think" seems to be going very contrary with me, although I don't want anyone to know. But isn't it wonderful to have a Mrs. Gummidge in our repertoire of characters of the world, to put a name and a face to these sad forlorn feelings?

And isn't it particularly wonderful to find that doorway in that boat and walk around inside, if only for a little while?

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The Old Woman Under A Hill

As a child I found the nursery rhyme that goes with this picture puzzling beyond words. This particular illustration of the rhyme is by Blanche Fisher Wright from The Real Mother Goose.

I very much love this old woman knitting a sock in front of what looks to be a cave entrance into the hill. I love her mobcap and those granny-glasses, and her intense concentration upon her knitting, and the way in which she has plunked herself down on that bench with her feet planted onto the earth.

She looks so . . . imperturbable, doesn't she? Yes, I had to look that word up ~ I'm not sure I have ever used it in my writing before ~ it means "unable to be upset or excited" and I do think it fits this woman perfectly. A herd of buffalo could travel over the top of her hill, and she would keep on knitting her sock.

But, as a child at age three or four, I simply could not make sense of the words to the rhyme. They seemed to express something too absolutely true. They fell into the realm of "magical truth" to me.

For these words seemed like some kind of trickery, and they have often come back to tantalize me. Something either is or it isn't. Suddenly, in my child's mind the chances of the old woman still living under the hill seemed to be way too capricious, for in the blink of an eye, she might be gone. 

Yet there she was, large as life, in the illustration! 

I grew up with this illustration of the rhyme from My Book House, edited by Olive Beaupre Miller, and perhaps this accounts for my uncertainty about the whereabouts of the woman who lived under a hill. In this picture, she is standing outside her doorway with a walking stick in her hand, ready to take off. Yes, she is definitely thinking about taking off and going somewhere else.

I can remember going back to this page over and over to see if she was still there, for if she's not gone, she will still be there. But what if she is gone? How this little rhyme worried my little mind! Children do not always say out loud what is bothering them ~ often they do not know how to put the worrisome thought into words.

And if we as parents and teachers ask, "Are you worried about something?" they will almost always say, "No." Ask them, "What are you thinking about?" and they will say, "Nothing." As if nothing at all was zooming around in those precious little minds, bouncing from east to west to north to south inside of those little heads with super-sonic speed, spinning fantastical webs of thoughts about everything.

 

Well, I don't live in a little cave under a hill, but I do live in a little cave-like box room under the roof of a little house, where I am surrounded by bookcases and brown file boxes and many years of teaching and writing and crafting paraphernalia.

So I made a hill out of black Canson paper, and I tore a little cave entrance into the hill with my fingers, attached it to the lens of my camera, so I could peek into my box room as if it were a room inside a cave.

Above is the north wall of bookcases and boxes as seen through my "cave" entrance. And below is the southeast corner. A hidey-hole of my own. I love living here in this tiny place under this roof.

 And if I'm not gone,
I live here still.

.

Come By Chance

I found Come By Chance by chance in a second-hand bookstore in Austin about 15 years ago. It is written and illustrated by Madeleine Winch who lives in New South Wales in Australia.

Come By Chance is a beautiful fable. It begins in such a plain and simple way: "Bertha was alone." Bertha finds herself "far from anywhere" and comes upon a "tumble-down old house." It's a fixer-upper, and she fixes it up. Then she names it "Come By Chance" and settles in. Winter comes, and one by one, animals come, too, looking for shelter.

And no one is left out in the cold. 

Yes, a fable for all time, and maybe especially for our time, when times are hard, and we really need to try to live our lives like Bertha. We really need to make sure that no one is left out in the cold, that no one is turned away from the table.

I love how Madeleine has given Bertha's hair a voice in the story. It speaks.

You know how a dog's ears perk up or lie flat or stand out like a pair of airplane wings? Bertha's hair speaks like that throughout the story. So sweet!

And Madeleine captures, completely, the love that exists between animals and human beings.

But there's even more because the text of this story does not tell the whole story. You have to "read" part of the story in the pictures. This is so important for children. Listening to the text and reading the pictures are both a part of learning to read.

For example, the text on the left-hand page says that "a storm began to rage." But when you look at the picture on the right-hand page, there is Bertha, opening the door, and a cow is peering inside, longing to come in out of the raging storm.

A child has to both listen to the words and also "read the picture" to get the story.

This is from the back cover. Silent tracks in the snow making their way to a house with lighted windows.

I love it when a children's picture book lets the pictures tell something important that is not in the words. It teaches children that understanding the written words on a page goes hand in hand with everything that surrounds those words.

Later they will need to know that understanding a single word inside a sentence goes hand in hand with understanding all the words that come before it and all the words that come after it, and maybe a whole lot of other things, too. They need to be ready to bring the whole world into the act of reading in order to develop what we call "comprehension."

My goodness! Listen to me talk! You'd think that I think I know something about reading! Honestly, I don't really. It's a mystery to me from beginning to end how, for most children, reading simply miraculously takes place. But if I can put my finger on even just one tiny little thing that helps anyone in helping children with reading, or with anything else, I would so love to find a way to do it.

Anyway, I can tell you for sure that Madeleine's animals are wonderful, and because she is from Australia, there is a kangaroo.  Such warm, cozy paintings for such a warm, cozy story about companionship and taking care of one another.

I think Come By Chance was out of print for awhile, but, in doing research for this post, I am so happy to be able to tell you that it was just reissued in April 2009! I think you can find it here at Walker Books Australia and New Zealand. Or check with your local bookstores to see if they have it or if they can order it for you.

Also, Madeleine Winch has her own website here, if you would like to see more of her prints, drawings, and paintings.

Please do take a chance on Come By Chance. And have a wonderful weekend!

I Think I Can

Most children grow up with some version of The Little Engine That Could story. I am quite sure there are Chinese and African variations on this theme, though I don't know what they are. But it is very hard to do anything unless you think that you can. I made this card for my students, but honestly, I made it just as much for myself, or for any friend who has reached that point in life where the top of the hill seems too far away.

This was the easiest card to make. I ran blue Canson art paper through my printer to print the words at the top. After I had cut the card to size (5" x 7"), with the words centered, I cut out a large circle of that night-sky blue cotton fabric. I positioned it with double-stick tape on the card so it left enough space on the card for the train. Then I trimmed off the unneeded parts of the circle.

The train is four little stickers. I mixed and matched the colors to make sure I had a blue engine and a red caboose ~ I couldn't imagine my little train any other way.

It turns out that perhaps I was remembering this 1954 version of the story by Watty Piper, The Little Engine That Could. The engine is definitely blue! And everyone knows that a caboose is supposed to be red.

The story is so simple: a long train must be pulled over a mountain and none of the larger engines will do it. Only the small engine goes to help. And the only way it finally pulls the long train over the big mountain is by chanting to itself, "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can."

There are days like that, when it feels as if we are pulling a very long train of burdens through a very long train of hours. Sometimes the only way we make it through those days is by thinking that we can. I can remember chanting myself through those first years of teaching. Through every year of teaching, if truth be told.

There are some children's stories that children need when they are children so that later when they are grown-ups they can summon them up again in times of need. I think this is one of those stories. A life-long life-line of a story.

Maybe the story of The Little Engine That Could is part of the reason that old steam trains are so enchanting for most of us. I think this old story must be entwined into the sight and sound of trains. This is "The Lilly Belle pulling Walter E Disney's coaches," photographed by SteamFan.

Well, the engine isn't blue, but it is decorated with bright colors, and seems more like a toy than a real train. I love the crayon-bright colors and the storybook look of it.

But I love this older-looking steam train, too. It is the "Blue Mountain and Reading Railroad 4-6-2 number 425 getting ready for the day's tourist train," photographed by Sean Lamb. I hope it is still making its daily run. I would hate for us to lose these old trains.

I took the train from Austin to Illinois a few years ago. I could not make it all the way to my hometown in northern Illinois by train anymore, for a wonderful train called "The Land of Corn" no longer travels through my little birthplace. I had to get off somewhere southeast of where I was born, and go the rest of the way by car. (Thank you, dearest aunt and uncle, for picking me up!)

It took a day and a night and another day to make this trip by train. I'll have to tell you about it another time, but if you ever have the chance to go alone as I did, and have a sleeper compartment to travel in, with only you and your journals and books and thoughts and dreams, please, please do go. Just go. As soon as you can.

 

Of course! Here is why that caboose is supposed to be red. It must be because of The Little Red Caboose, first written by Marian Potter and illustrated by Tibor Gergely in 1953, published by Little Golden Books.

And I might just take a moment to mention that my own personal color spectrum is all the primary colors of a first-grader's 8-color crayon box at one end of the spectrum to these colors at the other end: rust, umber, driftwood, smoke, pewter, ashes, charcoal, and pitch-black.

Before I end this post, I want to explain how the earth got turned into the night sky. I tried to make the night sky fabric the background and the earth was a patterned forest-green, but the little train got lost in the other patterns. I wanted the train to stand out more, in full relief.

So I chose the plain blue for the background, but I couldn't bear to give up that night sky fabric. I tried it out as the "earth" and suddenly the whole planet became the universe!

I felt, or I hoped, that it put the whole idea of "I think I can" on another level. Something more spiritual. Sometimes it's easier to make it up the mountain of a bad day if we can see ourselves ascending into the starry universe instead.

I hope your day today is a good one. And if it is a hard day, too hard for you to even imagine getting to the top of its impossible mountain-climb, please chant your way up its too-steep slope, step by step, star by star:

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.

I know that you will make it.

Two Books, One Secret Connection

I got to wondering if Michelangelo painted his famous creation painting in just this way because he was thinking about how we use our pointing finger with children to say Look! to make the world come to life for them. It's exactly what we do, isn't it? By pointing and saying Look! we give our children all the things of the world, one by one.

Look!

It's one of the most important things that we adults say to children. And sometimes we find ourselves saying it a hundred times a day, and pointing when we say it: Look at this! Look at how beautiful this is! Look at how this works! Look up there! Look down here! Look out!!!

I had a huge experience with the word Look! with a third-grade class of mine. It involves two children's books which happen to have a secret connection. One of the books has an illustration that must have been inspired by a photograph in the other book. The two books need to be side by side in order to see this. And seeing this is an amazing experience.

If you want to try this with your own children or your own class, here is what you need:

The first book you need is Watch the Stars Come Out, written by Riki Levinson and illustrated by Diane Goode. A poignant story told with warm and loving words that are mirrored with warm and loving illustrations.

The children in my class were either Hispanic-American or African-American, and we had just recently spent a period of time studying how their families had come to America. Sometimes we knew for sure, sometimes we had to look into history to find their ancestors' stories.

We were now looking at that wave of immigrants who came here in the early 1900s by way of the Statue of Liberty. Watch the Stars Come Out is a perfect book to read to capture this particular immigrant journey from a ship to Ellis Island to the first night in a brand-new land.

But I also knew of a book I could show them with real photographs of this period of time, too.

The second book you need is Immigrant Kids by Russell Freedman, a profound look at what it was like to be an immigrant child at the turn of the century. So there we were, a couple of days after reading Watch the Stars Come Out, going through the pages of Immigrant Kids.

I turned one particular page and there was a photo that just blew me away. It happened so fast, I couldn't stop myself. Look! I heard myself saying, and then I was reaching for Watch the Stars Come Out and saying Look! Look! and we were all looking and talking and pointing, and questions and answers were being tossed around like confetti. 

There is a photo in Immigrant Kids that Diane Goode must surely have used as the model for one of her illustrations in Watch the Stars Come Out. And it was so exciting to know that an illustrator takes the time to research a children's picture book story like that. So very exciting to get this insight into how an illustrator goes about creating an illustration, what she used from the photo, what she didn't use, what she added that wasn't in the photo. And then we went on to wondering if she had seen this photograph in Russell Freedman's book or had she seen it somewhere else? Could she have seen it somewhere else?  All of a sudden, we're looking at copyright dates and photo sources!

All of it was exciting. Plus we couldn't help but feel we had discovered a secret. A secret connection between an illustration and a photograph. How cool is that?

The first year that it happened, I was the one who said Look! The next year, I managed to stop myself from doing that and let my class find the secret connection so they could be the ones to say Look!

I don't know if it matters which book you read first, but I repeated the same sequence, first the Levinson book, then the Freedman book, except this time I didn't say a word.

No one saw the connection. We read both books twice, I kept them on the class reading table, I asked kids to go and find this, that, or the other for me, one kid looking in one book, another kid in the other book, side by side. I left the books oh-so-casually open to the appropriate pages among other books on the reading table, some closed, some also open to various pages.

I came to school for days with my hands in handcuffs behind my back to keep from pointing, with tape over my mouth to prevent myself from saying Look!

It felt as if it took forever. And then it happened. One kid saw it. Hey! Look! Then two, three, four kids crowded around the two books, pointing. Then the whole class began looking around, getting up. And then they brought the two books to me and they presented them to me, saying Look! It was as if they were giving me the keys to the kingdom, the secret to the universe, the creation of the world.

If you try this, you will have to figure out how to keep yourself from pointing and saying Look! I promise you, it is very hard to do, especially since the only way that this can really work, if you want to let them find it for themselves, is that you can't tell them there is something in one book that is almost the same as something in the other book. You can't say a word. Otherwise they'll know that you already know. They'll still have the fun of finding it, but they won't be able to give the surprise to you.

Just below is an 1881 painting by Camille Pissarro titled "Conversation." I do love these two women talking so intently across that weathered old picket fence. Telling secrets, if you ask me. And since I don't really want to keep you in total suspense, if you scroll down past these two women telling their inner-most secrets to each other, I will give you the page numbers to look for in the two children's books.

Just in case you scrolled down by mistake and really want to find these two pages by yourself, I'll put the page numbers into a little "code" of sorts ~ Goodness! I must have been a secret agent once upon a time! 

Watch the Stars Come Out is an unnumbered picture book so you have to count the pages. Find the page that is the answer to 11 + 22 - 7 =

Immigrant Kids is a numbered book, so it will be much easier. Find the page that is the answer to 10 + 24 -12 =

If you try this with your own children or your own class, I would really really love to know how it worked out for you. It was a high point of my teaching days. I hope the authors, illustrator, and photographer won't mind that I put this little secret on my blog. It's still a pretty secret place here!

If you know of any other illustration/photograph connections like this one, I would really love to know about that, too.

xo Kari

P.S. And if I got the page numbers wrong, please, please do let me know! I don’t add, subtract, or count as well as I used to . . .

A Guardian Scarecrow

I feel in the need of guardians again. I do know they are all around us, all the time. But sometimes they seem to be wearing way too many layers of invisible cloaks. I wish they'd take them off every now and then.

Anyway, September seems to me like the perfect month for having a guardian scarecrow hovering around. I know they are supposed to be watching over new little seedlings, so I guess that's why it seems as if they should be more of a spring and summer guardian, but for some reason I always think of scarecrows in relation to autumn instead. Maybe it's because of all those autumn-harvest crops that I love so much, like pumpkins, for example.

The stars encircling my guardian scarecrow are cut-paper, the vine is green thread, and I made the hat out of a straw hat that I found at the Goodwill. I found two hats, actually, one for the scarecrow in my garden and one to use to make miniature straw hats, or baskets, for my cards.

Here is what is left of the hat I use for my cards. It is slowly being devoured by miniature scarecrows in need of hats, or miniature ladies in need of baskets.

The way I make a miniature hat is to plaster a small portion of the back of this hat above with clear tape. Then I cut out the crown of the hat and the brim, each one separately. I tape the crown and brim together from the back, and then, when I'm ready, I use double-stick tape to fix the hat in place on top of the scarecrow.

As you can see, a piece here and there of the straw is coming loose. And I'm starting to like that. I've been painstaking in trying to make each little part so perfect, cutting off every loose thread, etc.

But I'm changing my mind about all of that. I think I should leave the loose ends and all the loose threads in place. I'm going to start letting that happen, and not just in my art. In my life, too. I'm thinking I might just have to let more things fall apart. Do you know what I mean? Maybe we're not always supposed to try to hold everything together.

Anyway, here's an outdoor scarecrow of mine from a few years ago:

This is where the other hat went. And speaking of falling-apart, that is the fate of scarecrows, isn't it? In fact, the more tattered and shredded and shabby that they become, the more perfect scarecrows they become, being more perfectly scary with every magnification of the "frayed and frazzled" look.

I really liked this jaunty scarecrow, all purple and red, with bright Mardi Gras necklaces around her neck.

Her clothing and hat ultimately disintegrated, but those Mardi Gras necklaces were almost indestructible. They never lost their color, and I think they would have lasted forever if the tiny threads that connected them hadn't finally deteriorated.

Here's the big outdoor hat up close. Those are silk flowers from a hobby store and they keep their color forever, too. Or maybe they're plastic. I really don't know for sure. The metal bells are hung with brown twine from the inside of the hat, to look like earrings. I thought these bells would jingle in the wind, but I guess it would take a hurricane-force gale to make them ring. Even so, they hang in such a lovely, calm, metallic silence.

Can you see that portion of a safety pin in the red apron at the bottom of this photo? I don't sew ~ I "safety-pin." Really, I'm often walking around in public wearing something or other that is safety-pinned to keep a hem from dragging or a seam from gaping open.

But back to the hat.

The hat itself has to be nailed to the central post in three places: one nail right on top of the crown, and then two nails, back and front, to make the brim stay down. Otherwise, from the street, you can't really see the brim at all. You lose the whole effect of the straw hat. It just becomes a horizontal line with a little bump where the crown is.

By forcing the brim down, you can see the straw hat in its full glory.

I showed you this scarecrow before, but I'm very partial to her in the same way that, if you're a writer, your favorite story is always the one you're working on. This is my favorite scarecrow because she's the one guarding the garden now. I really love this scarecrow!

Only the wooden frame, the old garden gloves, and the bells survived from the older one. I had to find yet another hat at Goodwill for her, because the one from that purple and red scarecrow just fell apart, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, straw to weathered-straw fragments, flakes, and powder.

This time I made her a necklace out of fabric remnants all tied together the way a kid ties sheets together to escape out of a two-story window, or a prison in a tower. In stories, of course ~ surely never in real life. Or have you tried this yourself and lived to tell the tale? 

This is Gladys. "Gladys as a scarecrow," photo taken by James.lebinksi, and given to the world on WikiCommons.

And isn't Gladys simply the very finest specimen of a crowus scarius bovinus that you have ever seen in your life? A very rare, shy, and only recently identified species, in case you haven't heard of her yet.

I put her here, not just to allow her a place in the sun, but also to let you know the full extent to which I really haven't done a whole lot of thinking outside of the box about scarecrows. I fully intend to enlarge my vision in this regard one of these days.

And since I put a crow on my scarecrow card, I added Van Gogh's painting of "Wheat Field with Crows" (1890) here. You can almost see the scarecrow that isn't painted here. Surely, the tatters of its clothing have become the tattered wheat, the tattered earth, and those tattered ribbons of green.  

For some reason, every slash of paint on a Van Gogh canvas is like a slash of lightning lighting up my heart and soul.

I've read enough about Van Gogh to know that great beauty can come from great pain. The art he created in the 1800s was stunning and unorthodox and revolutionary. The world was not ready for him during his lifetime. I hope that he knows that he has endured the test of time.

If I could, I'd send Van Gogh my guardian scarecrow to watch over him. I wonder if I'd change the words that I wrote ten years ago, below.

I borrowed a few words from the Talmud: Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, "Grow, grow."  I hope the Talmud doesn't mind.

Please let this be my wish for you if by chance you are reading this today!

Your guardian scarecrow knows
how to protect you from every kind of harm.
She will watch over you
in sunshine and rain and hail and sleet.
Her rustling dress and flapping hat
will scare away
all your fears and tremblings.
She will whisper to you every day
in the cool of the moon and the heat of the sun,
"Grow, grow, grow."
Then she will send you on your way filled with
her wisdom and mystery.

.

P.S. This is another guardian in my attempt to make a hundred guardians as part of Tollipop's brilliant "Make One Hundred Somethings" project, which you can find here.

A Story for Bear

A Story for Bear by Dennis Haseley and illustrated by Jim LaMarche is one of those rare picture books that profoundly spans interest levels all the way from childhood to adulthood in the way in which it depicts the friendship of a gentle and kind woman with a gentle and wild bear.

It takes us from season to season, and in and out of years, and all the while, it is taking us deeper and deeper into the great mystery of the strange markings that make words in books, and the power that these markings have even when they are undecipherable. Maybe especially when they are undecipherable.

Haseley's poetic prose and LaMarche's enchanting illustrations are a perfect match.

And maybe what I love the most is that this is a book about reading that allows for "reading between the lines" to take place. Not everything is explained. The mystery of this world of ours is given a place here.

A woman who is spending the summer alone in the woods is approached, shyly, by a bear who wants to listen to her reading. She reads to the bear all summer long.

A bear who cannot read is drawn first to the tiny marks on a letter he finds in the woods. Then he finds the woman and her books and the sound of her voice. He returns again and again to listen to her read.

Autumn comes, and she must leave him. Oh, how many times in my life have I longed to be able to speak to a beloved pet, to let my pet know that I'll be back, that all will be well?

She cannot tell him that she'll be gone for a while, that she'll be back again. She cannot tell him what she wishes for him, but she leaves behind that part of herself that the bear has loved the most: her books.

The back cover shows the bear sitting among all the books that she has left for him. LaMarche has found a way to make this bear a real bear and yet child-like in the most wonderful way: here is a bear-child sitting among all of its toys, pondering which one to play with. Its little toes are curled up, like a smile. So sweet!

Winter is coming, and the bear takes the books one by one to his cave for the long winter hibernation. From beginning to ending, Haseley's choice of words throughout are pure poetry.

I feel it is a crime for me to write a synopsis of this beautiful picture book. It is like using prose to explain a poem. I justify it only because I hope (if you haven't already) that you will find this book in your local library, or buy it, and let a child in your life experience it, with you right there, just the two of you, reading and listening together.

And if you are teacher, it will be just the same, just you and your class, reading and listening.

This book will take you right into a state of awe.

I tried to recreate the back cover (above) with a little stuffed bear of my own. I surrounded him with the tiniest books that I own. I gave him Emily Dickinson right off the bat, and the Chinese-English pocket dictionary seemed as if it might be of interest to him. I have a small, fat book titled Witch's Brew: Good Spells for Prosperity, so I put that one before him. Who knows how far his interests might range? The rest of the books are sweet little books from China with bright covers and blank pages, for writing in, plus that little fat black spiral notebook. He'll want to start making his own marks soon enough. And lastly, the video of The Bear just in case he gets tired of all that reading and writing.

I started thinking about how most of us never outgrow our ability to fall in love with a stuffed animal, and how we have this curious ability to breathe life into inanimate objects.

And then I couldn't keep from thinking about how children who cannot read will bow their heads over the pages of a book, looking and touching, breathing life into those strange inanimate markings, turning those marks into something called story.

I have a little gecko who asked to listen to A Story for Bear, too. So I let him.

If you click on the Amazon.com link to this book here, be sure to read the reviews here ~ and I also found a very interesting interview with both Haseley and LaMarche that you might like, too.

I hope you have a chance to read A Story for Bear: It captures something that can't really be captured. I wonder how it does that??

.

Scrapbook: P.S. Bells & Empty Pages

There are only seven remedies in The Secret Remedy Book, because it's a story, and a story has to have its own boundaries. One glass slipper. Two paths in the woods. Three wishes. Four hungry children. The Famous Five. Six swans. Seven remedies.

But I added one more remedy to the scrapbook because the scrapbook is a prop for me to use with children in connection with The Secret Remedy Book, and I did not want children to think that there are only seven remedies in all the world.

One more remedy: "Tie bells on your clothes." And then the extra caveat: "You must do one little dance to celebrate the wearing of the bells."

We had the sweetest little cat by the name of Missy (short for Mystery). She was Boo's little sister. We don't know what happened to her before we got her to make her so afraid, but she lived in hiding all her little life, in closets, under the furniture, behind the loveseat.

We tied a little bell to her collar so we could find her. During the evening or in the middle of the day, we would hear a streak of jingles go zooming down the hallway, and so we knew that Missy was making her move from the box room to the bedroom.

I loved the sound of her bell, telling me just where her little heart was beating.

 

This is a box full of the kind of bells we hung on Missy's collar. These are the bells I hung on my dress in my scrapbook. They came from a hobby store, the sort of thing we used to buy at the old "five and dime" stores.

Every now and then I'd have a little girl in my class who would come to school with just these same little bells tied on her shoelaces. I know that other teachers made their students take them off. But bells! I'm afraid I found it too magical. Too musical. I don't know why, but it just never seemed like a problem to me. (It didn't happen very often ~ you'd think it would have spread like wildfire.)

They say teachers have eyes in the backs of their heads. Alas, I never felt that I did. But it made me smile every time I knew, without looking, exactly where my little Tiffany or Tatiana or Tameeka was, just by the sound of those bells on her shoes.

Here is the two-page spread for the bell remedy. The page on the left contains the remedy, a flowered hat with ribbons and bells, a coin bag with a collection of bells, and a silver bell cut out of a magazine. The whole page is bordered, top and bottom, with the same ribbon that I used as a belt for the dress on the right.

The dress was so much fun to make! A colorful cotton print over which I laid an apron that came with its own ribbed fringe and the faintest smattering of flowers imprinted upon it. I added the rick-rack at the bottom of the cotton dress and, of course, the bells. There are five bells along the fringe of the apron and one bell at the V of the neckline of the dress.

The apron, although "apron" seems hardly the right word for something so aerial as this particular apron, is made out of some kind of fairy-rainbow-gauze. It comes with its own interior ribbing, with a swirling pattern of color that looks like galaxies whirling around in space. It is see-through if you hold it up to the light.

I wonder what a person who sews clothes ever makes out of such ethereal material??

It is like the kind of lace curtains that shy people peek through before daring to go outside, but those curtains are always antique-white or dove-gray or biscuit-brown, and this one, if it were a curtain, would be a very unshy, kaleidoscopic, gypsy curtain.

In searching for "bells in art," I found this work of art by Diego Velázquez: "Porträt des Infanten Philipp Prosper". It is a portrait of little Philipp Prosper, who only lived from 1657-1661. A little boy in fragile health, wearing what we think of today as a girl's dress, standing so tall and bravely, with "tiny bells and lucky amulets" decorating his smock.

Knowing how short his little life was, I'm so glad he got to wear those bells, if (perhaps) only for this painting. Don't you know that he loved the jingle that they made?

The rest of the secret remedy book is full of blank pages. I left them blank on purpose to show children that there is still much to be written, to be thought about, to be discovered, to be created, and, in particular, to show children that there are many more pages for many more remedies!

The blank page! What to put on it? I wonder what kind of remedy you would put here? What curious or simple little thing has worked for you, or for your children, or your grandchildren, or your class, or an elderly relative, or a troubled friend? Or if you asked a child what they thought would be the best remedy for feeling better on a bad day, what did they say?

Oh, I do wish you would tell me just one little remedy that you know about!!

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Scrapbook: P.S. One Small Great Thing

In the seventh remedy in The Secret Remedy Book, I wanted to try to make the point for children that we must not only dream of doing great things, but we must always be working on making our dreams come true by doing "one small great thing tomorrow," whatever it might be.

The fire bow above is someone's dream long ago of a great thing. It must have taken many small great steps and missteps to finally make a fire bow that really worked. I have no memory of where I found this drawing of the fire bow, but it is not mine. I can tell that I have cut out the words "FIRE BOW" and pasted them across the top of the drawing.

A fire bow seemed like a perfect image to put on an extra page in my scrapbook to show a class of children how I was working on making one particular dream of my own come true.

In my post about the seventh remedy, I added a sentence at the very bottom of the scrapbook page to say what I would do to start making one of own dreams come true: "Tomorrow I will write on one of my stories."

I am not an inventor of things like fire bows, but I do love to "invent" stories.  Sometimes I see a picture or I read something in a newspaper or I hear someone tell a snippet of a story, and suddenly I get an idea. Sometimes a story comes to me out of nowhere, and I just write it down as fast as I can.

But I am also very visual, and I always gather images or objects to help my stories come alive for me.

So I added a two-page spread to the scrapbook to show how I was starting to work on one of my stories, "one small great step" at a time. I wanted to be able to show children the kinds of odds and ends that I gather together, a phrase or a title, plus the things that I cut out of magazines or make with my own hands, before words ever go onto paper.

Here is the two-page spread with just a few words and pictures out of which a story (eventually) was written. A title: "The Keeper of the Fire." A drawing of a fire bow. A matchbox. Four "matches" made from cardboard and colored paper. (I did not want to chance starting a real fire with real matches inside this tinderbox of a scrapbook!)

And two photos taken from long-lost magazines. One is of a metal lantern with the flame burning brightly inside. And the other is of a wood fire in an olden fireplace in a setting that seems to have been created just for the story that I had in mind.

It was as if some stranger in the world knew just what I needed for a story I hadn't even written yet!

I printed the title from a font that I now no longer have. I searched and searched for it. But what a perfect font for The Keeper of the Fire! If anyone recognizes this font and knows where I can find it again, I would love to have it back.

My dream about this particular story was to: "Write a story about an old woman who is the Keeper of the Fire." I saw her as the matriarch or maybe even the "white witch" of a little village in the mountains, the only person who knows how to make fire with her fire bow. Then a traveler comes, bringing matches to the village, and no one thinks that they need the old ways anymore.

I can just see my old woman sitting on her wooden chair with its woven seat, tending her fire among her homey things, her clay pots, her tools, with her old straw hat hanging from the mantle. A pair of scissors appear to be hanging there, too. And there are flowers in a jug on top of the mantle.

Yes, I have indeed written this story. As a matter of fact, I have written several versions, I have sent it off to several publishers, and it has come back as many times as it has been sent. But even I know that I have not gotten it quite "right" yet.

It burns quietly upon a far back-burner in my mind. But one of these days, it will flare up.

I loved fixing the matchbox so that I could use it on this page. I took a small, roughly 2 inch by 1 and 1/2 inch matchbox, and made it half as deep. The little drawer still pulls out and closes back inside. I keep a lucky penny in it for now, but I can always change its contents to suit the occasion.

The little matchbox is every child's favorite part of this page. And, of course, it's easy to pass out a lucky penny to everyone!

But, to me, the important thing about adding this page is to find a way to let children know that you must start somewhere, some small great somewhere, in order to make your dreams come true.

To begin a story, maybe all you need is a title, a magazine clipping, and an empty matchbox. Then keep going. Find the next small great thing. Add it on. Keep going.

You might even end up with a whole different story: "Fire in Need of a Keeper!"

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