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.
.
