Writing Up A Storm

Pumpkin Moonshine

Pumpkin Moonshine was Tasha Tudor's first published children's book, which she originally made for a young niece of hers, perhaps named Sylvie Ann like the little girl in the story. This is a very sweet, old-fashioned story. Sylvie Ann goes to the field to find the fattest pumpkin, it rolls away from her, causing havoc along the way, until finally the girl and her grandfather scoop it out and carve it into "pumpkin moonshine," which is another way of saying "jack-o'-lantern." The book ends with Sylvie Ann back in the field planting pumpkin seeds for next year's crop.

This one little book started Tasha Tudor on her long and very wonderful career in illustrating and writing for children.

The text is carefully handwritten, with letters gently squeezed or elongated to make the lines both right and left justified on the page. This reminds me of my first little book which I wrote at age nine on my grandmother's typewriter. I, too, tried to justify all the lines the way they would be in a real book, and puzzled deeply over how this was done as I tried to trick the typewriter into squeezing letters together.

Pumpkin Moonshine is a small book. My paperback copy measures 6 and 1/2 inches square. I am quite certain it is currently back in print again. It has an innocent appeal that has "stood the test of time."

Sadly, however, I'm not sure that Tasha would stand a chance in the publishing world today, if she were offering this little book as a first-time writer. The last I heard from people in the publishing world is that publishers are looking for children's picture book stories that are "edgy." This may be true, but I honestly think that there is hardly anyone outside of the publishing world who is looking for edgy in children's picture books. Or it might well be that I don't understand the meaning of the word "edgy" in this context. It sounds very sharp to me on the one hand, or about to plunge off of a precipice on the other hand. Perhaps it means "cutting-edgy" as in "on the cutting-edge?"

I love the sweetness in all of Tasha Tudor's drawings, but it is her life that really fascinates me, for she lived the life she illustrated. The Tasha Tudor website says that she "lived without running water until her youngest child was five years old." She wanted to live back in the 1800s, and so she did. She made her own candles, soap, and dolls, wove her own cloth, made all her four children's clothing, knitted, baked, gardened, canned. And she did all of this while living in the twentieth century from 1915-2008.

I have a memory of one of my favorite photographs of her, an eighty-year-old woman in a kerchief, in a very long dress, plus apron, sweater, and scarf, all in browns and grays and faded prints and dusty stripes and charcoal woolens, in the middle of an autumn field, carrying an enormous bundle of kindling, and barefoot.

My mother-in-law Oleta has lived a very Tasha Tudor life herself, as an artist, gardener, cook, and keeper-of-the-fire. On camping trips, Oleta is the one who tends the fire and banks the coals at night. And that reminds me of another photo of Tasha, painting by firelight . . .

I love how Tasha Tudor simply lived her life as she saw fit without for one minute trying to fit into what the rest of the world was up to. She might have been on the cutting-edge of something here!

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The Pumpkin That Never Was

Eighteen years ago I tried to grow pumpkins for my class. I started my pumpkin project in my own backyard in the summertime long before school started in the fall. Near our back fence, I made four little soil hills in which I planted the seeds and from which came a great tangle of vines. It looked very promising.

However, the great tangle of vines produced only one little yellow flower and not one single pumpkin.

We wrote stories and drew pictures and made books anyway ~ about the pumpkin that never was. This is all that remains of the cover to one of our pumpkin books. Beneath the lamination, you can see the actual vine itself.

I took it to class and we studied it at great length. It was a lovely leafy green, and the flower (lower right-hand quadrant of the cover) was a deep dusty yellow.

Here is a closer view of the little flower. You can just barely make out the faint yellow-brown tint that is left in the petals, petals that were once open, but by the time of lamination, had closed up like a little yellow rosebud.

In a few more years, perhaps, the yellow of the flower and the green of the vine will have become one and the same sepia brown.

I have lost almost everything of my students' work, but I have a few of their drawings of our pumpkin vine. These were the covers for their very scientific descriptions of the vine. (We were studying descriptive writing at the time.)

I love how each cover is different even though you can tell there was an overall direction to make a frame, draw the vine, and include a title and their name. But what I especially love is that you can see that they were working on these together as a class, borrowing ideas from each other. I can see them wandering around the room to see what everyone else was doing, going up to the vine to take a closer look, and then returning to bend over their own work again.

I've been studying these old pictures, and I think now we must have done a brown-crayon frame together as a class, to get them started. Each child has drawn a single-line, brown-crayon frame around the perimeter of the page. Then some of the children decorated the outside edge of the frame and some of them didn't.

This one reminds me of all the times I have misjudged the amount of space it will take me to write something that I fully intended to be centered. I love how Samuel kept on going across the line of the frame to get that fine "e" in place.

And here Shannon sets great bands of colors around an interior that she leaves daringly blank. I love her little yellow-orange flower right in the center at the bottom. I am wondering now if the vine was displayed at the front of the room for them to copy with the little flower in the middle somewhere, for they have all drawn the vine and flower in a very similar way.

And I love Cynthia's title: "The old dead flower and the old dead vine." Really, I'm tempted to write a story with that exact same title.

And speaking of stories, I don't know what happened to the stories that they wrote about "The Pumpkin That Never Was." Perhaps it is appropriate that they are lost, along with the pumpkin, vanished into that sacred place where lost things are kept safe, along with all the things that were ever hoped for but never came to pass.

I am quite sure the pumpkin that never was holds court somewhere, as round and as bright as a harvest moon.

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Pumpkins, Pumpkins

Within walking distance from my house, there is an organic foods supermarket called Central Market. These orange pumpkins in a very large bin by the front door caught my eye on account of the name: Wolf Pumpkin.

Because my father was Hans Hermann Karl Wulf, I have always been drawn to wolves or wülves of any kind, seeking clues about my heritage in the same way that other people search for their ancestors in genealogical charts.

These wolf pumpkins look very much like the pumpkins I remember as a child, with ribbed sides and sturdy handles and that very solid Halloween-orange color.

Since my childhood, however, a huge variety of pumpkins have come upon the market with names like Phat Jack, Conestoga, Hannibal, Warlock, Gargoyle, and Knucklehead.

The first ones I remember seeing a number of years ago that weren't the typical round orange pumpkins were the Cinderella and the Fairytale varieties.

The Cinderella pumpkin is a vivid red-orange with mottled dark spots that make it seem all aglow, like a magnificent fiery ember. It is a large pumpkin with a much flatter shape than the wolf pumpkin above. I find it quite easy to imagine it as the resplendent carriage that takes Cinderella to the ball.

This pumpkin was apparently cultivated in France and is a French heirloom pumpkin called a "Rouge Vif d'Etampes." One source says this particular variety was brought to the United States in 1883. Perhaps "returned" would be the better word, however, since the origin of the pumpkin itself is believed to be North America. 

The ancestry of all the many pumpkins available today might make for interesting reading ~I picture seed packets crossing back and forth across the oceans and being delivered to greenhouses at midnight for cross-pollination behind closed doors. Spies and secret agents included. Very top secret and hush-hush!

The Fairytale pumpkin is harder for me understand how it came by its name. It is a pale brown, almost mushroom-colored. Perhaps that is the fairy tale connection: mushrooms, toadstools, fairies-in-the-woods. A couple of websites called the color "buckskin," and one used the word "mahogany," but I see it more as a mother-of-pearl brown.

Perhaps its burnished-brown color seems more coach-like, and therefore more likely to be the pumpkin chosen for Cinderella's coach.

(My photo picks up too much orange. These pumpkins really are not orange.)

This is my pumpkin for this year. It is about the size of a grapefruit and very smooth. I bought it because of the handle, which looks curiously equine to me. I'm calling this a Horse-Handle pumpkin.

I love this season ~ it is my very favorite time of the year. And the pumpkin seems to be a very big part of what we all tend to love about October and November: jack-o'-lanterns and pumpkin pies!

There is something wonderful about the labyrinthine tangle of vines that makes the pumpkin. I have tried to grow pumpkins myself and have not ~ yet ~ been successful, but I would love someday for our whole side yard to be a pumpkin patch. It's on my great-pie-in-the-sky-to-do-list!

(I want the side yard to be a woods, too, so I will have to figure out I can have both the woods and the pumpkin patch.)

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Halloween Houses

My little neighborhood is dressing up for Halloween. Every year the Halloween decorations multiply and become larger and more daring. This is one of my favorite houses at any time of the year, a lovely painted lady, but this year for Halloween she is particularly colorful.

The house itself is a deep turquoise with bands of red shingles and painted porch railings.

During this month of October, brightly-colored pumpkin lanterns and skeleton heads hang over the porch, like faces in a crowd.

I took this photo in the rain. I was sure my camera would catch the raindrops coming down, but they are invisible here, although you can see the damp concrete.

It is early morning and the porch light is still on, adding to the festivity of the scene. I love the orange glow of the pumpkins on the steps, the skeleton on the far left, the painted flowerpots, and the metal turkey sculpture with its fan of metal "feathers" behind the table on the far right.

A few blocks away, and things are a little more ghoulish here. Cobwebs and spiders are swarming this house. Caution tape surrounds the crime scene, there is a very grave graveyard on the far left, and a host of life-size figures on the right. Halloween scarecrows!

And here is my sweet little old-fashioned lilac house! Do you remember her from my post about The Lost Blue Riding Hood? Who would ever have thought that she would succumb to Halloween?

Here she is above in her rightful state of mind, as shy and introverted and as modest as they come, wearing a coat of lilac paint so delicately hued that she is almost gray. Really, her lilac is so faint, you can tell that she barely has one little toe out of the gray color band.

But when a house lapses into some tiny little extravagance, like straying into lilac tints, you can be sure that eventually she will lapse into larger and much more dangerous extravagances.

Yes, look at the lilac house now! Talk about Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde. . .

I love how some of the houses in my neighborhood are being transformed into Halloween houses, although mine won't be one of them. And that brings to mind something I have long thought about, being very introverted as I am and prone to dwelling upon things in a prolonged kind of way.

Thoughts on Extroverts and Introverts

Some people are very extroverted and love to dress up, especially in costume, and dance upon table tops, and sing from mountain tops, and I love it that they do. I am not one of them, but I treasure such people.

We all know the differences between extroverts and introverts, but there is one difference that mystifies me the most. It is this. Generally speaking, introverts tend to feel that there is nothing wrong in others being extroverted, while extroverts tend to think that there is something wrong with people who are introverted. For example, an extrovert will often say, "What's wrong with you? Why don't you want to go to the party?" On the other hand, an introvert rarely ever says, "What's wrong with you? Why do you want to go to the party?" 

Speaking of parties, we've been invited to a Halloween party, costume optional. My husband and I are both very introverted. Will we go to the party, or not? Will we go in costume, or not?? 

Long Live the Mystery and Halloween, too!!

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The Snow Queen: The Ending

To conclude this week's posts on The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen, the ending begins when Gerda finds Kay on the floor of the ice palace. He is surrounded by pieces of ice. The Snow Queen has told him that if he can make the ice spell the word "Eternity," he may have the whole world plus a pair of ice skates. Oh, how I puzzled over this as a child! I could not spell this word myself when my mother first read this story to me, and so it did seem very much like an impossible task.

My mother used to let me play outside with a bowl of ice cubes and try to spell "Eternity." On a cold winter day sitting on top of our cold concrete driveway, this was wonderful playacting indeed. And what a fine word Andersen chose for this ice puzzle! A word that is very hard for a small child to spell, and harder still to understand the meaning of.

And equally puzzling was the prize ~ the whole world plus a pair of ice skates? What a stroke of genius for Andersen to add those ice skates!

And I love how the saving of Kay takes place. Gerda weeps when she sees that Kay does not even recognize her, and her tears wash away the sliver of the mirror in his heart. He then weeps himself, and the splinter of mirror in his eye is washed away. It is such a sweet and graphic description of love saving someone. If you have ever been awash with your feelings of love for someone, you know that this feeling can cause your eyes to fill with tears. 

And, alas, if you have ever wept before someone you love who is on a very dark path, you also know that tears are usually not enough to save them.

The Snow Queen has what we have come to think of as "the fairy-tale ending." In teaching story-telling to young children, I always tried to teach them the difference between the "solution" and the "ending." The solution in The Snow Queen is the shedding of tears that wipe away the mirror. The ending is the two children walking out of winter into spring, where they say goodbye to the Robber-maiden, but they are all changed, for they are older and wiser now, and by the time Gerda and Kay arrive back home, "it was summer, glorious summer."

Yes, the fairy-tale ending! And you can tell by the expression on children's faces how much they love this kind of ending.

Not all fairy tales have happy endings, but there are some schools of thought that would say without the happy ending, they are not truly "fairy tales." In a broad sense, myths are usually tragic, fairy tales have happy endings, and fables are the cautionary tales. At any rate, long before there were self-help books, and long before there was a branch of knowledge called psychology, there were the fairy tales, and we still love them and need them today.

These fairy tales have traveled very far to get to us. They come from so very long ago and so very far away. I would hate to ever see them taken away from childhood.

Long live the fairy tale! And may you have a wonderful fairy-tale weekend!!

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The Snow Queen: The Pursuit

Continuing from yesterday's post, the pursuit in The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen begins when Gerda takes off on her own to find Kay. As a child, I was very much in awe over this part of the story when the girl goes in search of her friend and will not give up on him. I wanted to be as brave as Gerda, too!

Thinking that perhaps Kay fell in the river, Gerda offers up her red shoes to the river if the river will give him back again, and so begins the fairy-tale quest.

The journey to find Kay is long and hard and it is fraught with both dangers and well-wishers: an old enchantress (shown above) who tries to keep Gerda for her own, a Prince and Princess, a Robber-maiden, Wood-pigeons, a Reindeer, the Lapp woman, the Finn woman, and an army of polar bears.

And how I both feared and marveled over the little Robber-Maiden! For she was scary and yet wonderful at the same time. I loved how fierce she was and how she was the one who helped Gerda to escape from the terrifying clutches of the band of robbers. It is a very big lesson to find out that sometimes help comes to us from the most unexpected places.

As Gerda draws closer to the ice castle of the Snow Queen, it is from the Finn woman that we learn that only Gerda's love can save Kay. I like it very much that in this fairy tale there is no magic potion, no magic kiss, even. No, we are told that the power to save Kay lies in Gerda's heart.

I am older now, and I do (still) believe that we need to believe that love can conquer all, although I know now that sometimes it does not. Even so, I would not give up the message in The Snow Queen for anything in the world, for it is in believing the impossible that we sometimes make impossible things come true.

Tomorrow: The Snow Queen: The Ending

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The Snow Queen: The Plight

Continuing The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen from yesterday, the plight of the story begins when the boy Kay gets a grain of sand from the mirror in his eye and a sliver of the mirror in his heart, and everything good and beautiful in the world appears poor and mean to him, and vice versa. He turns his back on his friends and runs after the Snow Queen, for she seems beautiful to him. And, yes, how very beautiful she is in her snowy sledge and her clouds of snowy robes!

I love how these old fairy tales delve into the depths of the human condition. They never pretend that the world is a safe place. Some of them challenge the deepest realms of psychological interpretations. I would imagine that The Snow Queen would be a treasure-trove for many a dissertation.

At first Kay attaches his little sledge to the Snow Queen's much larger sledge, and, later, when he tries to get away, it is too late. She has captured him. In my lifetime I have seen many a person, including myself, fall into the clutches of choices that take them way too far off the beaten path, and sometimes they never find their way back again.

Here is the exact moment when Kay latches on to her sledge. How powerful this fairy tale is!

When I was teaching, I felt that every child in my class was as vulnerable as little Kay. The interior of a classroom is so safe. Fifteen or twenty children all sitting cross-legged on the rug for story time, surrounded by all the trappings of an elementary school classroom: chalk and crayons and lined paper and readers and little desks with little chairs behind each one, bulletin boards crowded with children's drawings and children's handwriting. And then, at the end of the day, you let all the children out your door into the big wide world.

Most of my students came from two large housing projects that surrounded our school on both sides. When I made home visits, I marveled to myself that the only reason in the world that I felt safe walking into these projects was because I was holding the hand of a little six-year-old child. If I had been alone, I would have been terrified inside those dark mazes.

I remember having the idea, when I was about six years old, that kidnappers drove around in a truck. The truck, I was sure, said "Kidnappers" in large letters on the side, so you could see it coming for you and get away in time. If I had grown up where it snowed, perhaps I would have imagined a very large sledge instead.

But The Snow Queen, to my way of thinking, is not about stranger-danger. I was not afraid that my students would be kidnapped before they got home. I was afraid that they would attach their lives to the allure of the drugs and the gangs that lived everywhere around them, that they would drop out and disappear, and that all the Gerdas in the world would never be able to find them or rescue them.

Every story needs a beginning and then a problem. The Snow Queen gives us our problem when Kay disappears into thin air, and only little Gerda believes he can be found.

Tomorrow: The Snow Queen: The Pursuit

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The Snow Queen: The Beginning

The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen begins long before this scene, in a long ago time when hobgoblins made a mirror in which everything good and beautiful looked poor and mean. The mirror fell to earth and broke into pieces, some as small as grains of sand. Sometimes these little pieces got into people's eyes or into their hearts and changed how they saw the world.

As a child, I did not like this beginning. My mother read this story to me any number of times, and I quietly put up with this prologue in order to get to the real beginning. For to me, the story began here, with the girl Gerda and the boy Kay sitting in this wonderful place just outside their dormer windows on a little ledge that connected their two attic rooms. (Very different attics, I might point out, from the attic in A Little Princess from last week's post.)

They each had a wooden box in which there were roses growing, and here they read and talked to each other. I don't know what it is that prevents children from literally plunging headfirst into illustrations that cast such a magical enchantment upon them.

This version of Andersen's story is in a 1937 printing of My Book House books. In some versions of the story, the boy's name is Kai, which I suspect might be in the original, but since this version uses the K-a-y spelling, so will I.

I no longer have all 12 volumes of My Book House. The pages of the ones that I do have are becoming very browned, and often the corners will flake away at the touch. They are like pie flakes browning in an oven.

This was my all-time favorite fairy tale growing up. I loved this illustration so much that sometimes, when I begged for this story to be read to me one more time, I did not want to leave this page. Perhaps I wanted to stay here where it was safe for as long as possible before I ventured forth into the danger that I knew was forthcoming.

Tomorrow: The Snow Queen: The Plight

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All the Little Princesses

An old painting of a girl, an attic window-ledge, a chimney, rooftops, sparrows, a cracked bowl. The colors are faded, poetic, dream-like. There's a whisper of wind in the girl's hair.

This one painting so enthralled me when I was young that perhaps it is the reason why I have never really found my way off of that rooftop or out of that attic. I seem to still be here ~ in thrall.

This illustration from A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett is from the 1953 edition with illustrations by Ethel Franklin Betts. Although this particular version is out of print, A Little Princess illustrated by Tasha Tudor is available. I don't think this children's book, in one form or another, has been out of print since 1904.

It is this one illustration that captures the whole story for me.

Sara Crewe, who was as rich as a princess, is now poor and has been banished to live in the attic, to work as a drudge, to be hungry and cold. But she finds a way to imagine herself as a princess anyway.

Sara ends up in the attic because her father loses his fortune and dies, leaving her both an orphan and a pauper. There are many paths to Sara’s attic.  My own path to the attic has been complicated, and I'm not quite sure why I have never really found my way back down again, but it's not been for lack of trying. Sara's story has a fairy-tale ending, which is what we hope for, of course, not only for ourselves, but absolutely for our children and for our children's children.

This story is a classic because its message is enduring. No matter what is taken away from you or what is not given to you or what you are asked to endure, the fact of your being a princess cannot be revoked.

It's not the fairy-tale ending that I love in this book. It is this picture of Sara, lost in thought, looking up above the rooftops, finding a way to imagine herself as she wants to see herself, regardless of her circumstances.

It is very hard to teach ourselves how to do this, much less to teach a child. I think most of us spend our whole lives learning how to be who we are in spite of whatever.

I love her little hand wrapped around a bowl so full of cracks that it seems as if it must be only the strength of her hand that keeps the bowl from falling apart.

Sometimes that is literally all we can do: try to hold ourselves together by some inner strength and keep on giving in spite of our circumstances.

There is a chimney in the illustration with two sparrows on its ledge. They are almost indistinct here, but still you can make them out, a pair of love birds, perhaps. I like the thought that Sara might be warmed a little by the fires lit down below for others, for as the heat rises, it will warm these bricks.

If you have a little girl in your life, oh, I do hope you will make sure that she hears or reads this book as soon as she is old enough for it. She may need its message when she goes out into the world as a child.

She may need it even more when she is older, for not everyone's life ends up with the fairy-tale ending. She may have to find a way to hold on to her image of herself and to the fantastical notion that there is still something in her bowl to give to the world.

Click on A Little Princess to find out more about the history of this book.

And to all the little princesses who find themselves in the attic, wherever you may be: remember Sara imagining herself at her attic window-ledge!

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Three Duck Decoys

This is another of Oleta's wonderful oil paintings: Three Duck Decoys. Oleta, my mother-in-law, grew up in rural Texas during the Great Depression among people who did not go "hunting and fishing" for sport; they went hunting and fishing to put food on the table. They gathered wild plants along the creek banks and wild berries from the fields and wild mushrooms from the woods. I love to hear Oleta's stories of how her family lived through those times.

This painting of hers reminds me of her stories. Partly, I suppose, it must be the deep-autumn colors in the painting that take me into the woods of my own memories, and into my longing as a child to actually be able to survive on my own in the woods behind our house. I read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn over and over. But Oleta actually lived the long-ago county-kid life that most of us fantasize about as being the way childhood should really be.

Our nostalgia for such childhoods often overlooks the hard times that many country folk lived through during the twenties and the thirties in our country. But even Oleta says: "We didn't know we were poor back then."

These colors really enchant me: those forest-green heads and antique-gold beaks, the russet autumnal browns, the charcoal black, a white as soft as the early morning fog, and that touch of slate-blue, as if Oleta had painted in a reflection of the sky. I picture the restraint it must take an artist, with all those colors on her palette, not to splash on too much.

And I love this little duck (see below), so unexpectedly upside down at the bottom of the painting! It is lying on the floor beneath the other two duck decoys. If you look closely, you can just make out "Oleta Cates, '75" in the far right-hand corner.

There's a sweet little story behind how this painting got painted in the first place. Oleta's very closest and dearest friends, a man named Jack and his wife, had a cabin on a fishing lake in East Texas. Oleta wrote me the story:

There was an old boat house, once used by the old timers when they went duck hunting. The old timers were long gone, and the younger generation built houses and used the lake for fishing and partying. Jack had the old wooden ducks in his cabin there and I fell in love with them. He asked if I would paint a picture of them for him. I painted two, one for him and one for me. He had his on the wall of his cabin, so he gave me the ducks. He passed away in 1990, and his wife not long after . . . and I don't know what happened to that painting."

I love knowing the story behind this painting: the three duck decoys in a cabin on a fishing lake, the two paintings, the gift of the ducks, and the mystery of where the second painting is now.

Here is where the painting that Oleta kept is hanging now, in this corner of our kitchen. That's a tangle of garlic flower-heads that my husband brings in from the wilds of our backyard ~ it's Oleta's garlic and it grows wonderfully rampant. There's another hot-air balloon ornament just to left of the painting, and another flying aeroplane hanging from a cattle yoke that is hanging from the ceiling. And there's the usual clutter of books, candlesticks, and teapots on the shelves just under the painting. I'm standing on a chair to get this view. The lamp is just over our kitchen table.

Well, there's no getting around the fact that our house is not quite ready for Decor 8 ~ yet, but we do have the very finest of original fine-art paintings on our walls. Thank you, Oleta!!

Here is Oleta's hawk on the other side of this window, hanging over its pair of shelves (you can't see the second shelf here ~ probably way too cluttered for viewing).

Anyway, my point is that you can plainly see that there's a smidgen of symmetry going on in our kitchen: two beautiful paintings with two matching shelves underneath. And, just to show you how symmetrical this really is, please do take note of the two duck napkin rings on this shelf that mirror the decoys in Oleta's painting on the other side of the window!

You can go here to find out more about the hawk painting.

I don't want to leave Oleta's painting without mentioning the window on the far left and the "lay of the land" inside the room. The window opens into the room where the two decoys are hanging on the wall and one is lying on the floor. The little one on the floor seems to almost float upon that floor. Like a decoy, it tricks us. It makes us look a second time. It challenges our sense of perspective. I'm not sure in this painting if we are meant to see everything in one particular way. It feels like a painting with secrets of its own.

I love the light coming through this window. I have always loved how Vermeer posed so many young women in front of light coming in through a window, and I feel that Oleta has captured the same light coming through her window, too. It enlightens the whole room with soft gold.

Plus, there is nothing more magical than just a sliver of a window into the world to pique our imaginations!

This is a little pond within walking distance from where I live. There are ducks that live here, too, but the day I took this photo they were all at the other end of the pond, and I was not thinking about ducks that day. This beautiful pond is very long and meandering, and has a bridge across it and a walking path all the way around it.

The next time I go back, I will be remembering Oleta's duck decoys, and all her childhood days, too, and I will try to get a photo of the ducks, and the bridge, and the path.

I'll be out of touch on Tuesday and Wednesday, but I will be back on Thursday. I hope your week is an especially good one for you.

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Victoria House

Speaking of saving things, as I have been doing in my last two posts, here is a wonderful children's picture book about saving a falling-down Victorian house: Victoria House, written by Janice Shefelman and illustrated by Tom Shefelman.

Janice and Tom are a wife-and-husband team who have worked on other books together, and they make a perfect team for this book. Tom is an architect, and because of his knowledge of architecture, his very fine watercolor drawings of the house give an in-depth architectural dimension to Janice's warm-hearted storytelling.

They begin the story on the front cover by showing where this wonderful old house begins ~ in the long ago past. Here is Victoria House in her prime in a countryside setting and in a time period when people still rode about in wagons drawn by horses.

Then you open the book and now the house has fallen into disrepair. The land has been sold, and the house is in jeopardy of being torn down until Sarah and Jess and their son Mason find it. They want the house for their own, but it will have to be moved from the country into the city.

Victoria House is the story of exactly how this happens. Step by step, this book shows how a two-story house is taken apart, how each separate story is loaded onto a flatbed truck, how it takes two trucks following each other to drive the bottom part and the top part of the house into the city in the middle of the night, how it is all put back together again in a new place.

Tom's extraordinary three-dimensional drawings make it possible to look down into the empty rooms of the first-floor story of the house as it is pulled by the truck through the night.

Another drawing, when the house has been put back together again in the city, shows a dollhouse view of the insides of the whole house. You feel as if you could reach right in with your fingers and help the workers downstairs by the fireplace, the two men carrying a couch up the stairs, someone hanging a painting in an upstairs room, the little boy Mason in the attic.

Tom also includes some architectural floor plans of each floor of the house, plans that look like a professional architect's drawings but are simple enough for young children (or architecturally-challenged adults) to understand.

And there are lots of details in all the drawings: for example, if you look closely, you'll see that one of the workers looks suspiciously like a very famous country-western singer.

This is the back cover of Victoria House. It is a scene of an olden tranquility, and I think it is a very fine representation of the loving care that has gone into this book by both the author and the illustrator to show the restoration of a beloved old house.

Because the subject matter is very complex and comes with words like gazebo, foundation, studs, girders, concrete piers, and spindlework, Janice has done something I find incredibly wise: she has made the story very simple. Once a house was lived in and loved, then it fell into vacancy and disrepair, then it was lived in and loved again.

And a little boy named Mason gets to have a bedroom ~ in the attic.

The house is never "just a house" because from the very first, Janice gives the house a name: Victoria. Such a lovely way to give this old house a heart and a soul!

For anyone who is thinking of purchasing an old house and moving it to a new location, this book is a wonderful blueprint for what is involved in actually making this happen. We've had any number of old houses moved into our neighborhood, and it is exciting to see it all take place. Once, in order to save a house from demolition, it was bought and moved only a few blocks away. It sits this very minute just down the street from where we live. We can see it from our front porch.

You can find out more about Tom and Janice Shefelman here, and about Victoria House here.

My husband and I have many times given this book as a gift. Tom Shefelman is an architect and so is my husband; Janice Shefelman is a former teacher, and so am I; they live in Austin, and so do we; they love old houses, and so do we. It has been the perfect gift for us to give away!

Anyone who loves old houses and who cares about saving old houses will love this very beautiful and architecturally-vivid children's picture book.

Anyone who has children who love to draw should grab this book up right away. And maybe get a tablet of tracing paper, too. Your kids will want to see if they can turn something two-dimensional into a three-dimensional view.

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Edited to add: Alas, it turns out that this wonderful book is currently out of print, but there may be used copies available online. I am hoping that one day it will be reissued!

Save the Wall

Someone put this sign on the stone wall that runs along the northern side of the grounds of the Elisabet Ney Museum in Austin. It's a very fine stone wall, and has a long history of its own. It is just short enough and broad enough to easily sit upon and muse about the world or have a tête-à-tête with a friend.

And it is now on the endangered species list.

My post from yesterday about the Brouhaha in the Kingdom tells a little about the controversy that is taking place over this particular wall, and whether the wall will be allowed to stand or be taken down.

Elisabet Ney, a famous sculptress, built this castle as her studio in 1892 and lived here until she died in 1907. It has been a museum for decades, housing many of her sculptures. The castle itself is enchanting, with secret staircases inside its turreted tower.

But now it is undergoing a major restoration. The strictest of the historical preservationists want to return both the castle and the grounds around it to the way they were when Elisabet lived here at the turn of the century ~ when the 1800s turned into the 1900s.

[And just out of curiosity, is that the turn of the 19th century or the turn of the 20th century?]

About 50 trees, the front iron gate, and this wall were added on since Elisabet's death. This is the northeast corner of the wall. You can see a ribbon tied around that tree behind the wall. Trees have been marked with ribbons to indicate which ones should be removed or which ones should be saved, but I have no idea what fate this ribbon above foretells.

It's like a fairytale, isn't it?

Do you remember the old fairytale about the gold being buried by a tree with a yellow ribbon tied around the tree to mark it, and then the next day all the trees have yellow ribbons tied around them?

I love this wall! It is such a wonderful place to sit and talk with a friend. I have often done just that, or sat on it by myself with my notebook and my thoughts.

And I love this great ancient tree. It is a wild-looking, mythical tree from some immemorial time. I am sure it is safe. It must have been here before Elisabet was even born. 

It seems like such an obvious decision: Save the Wall! Save the Trees!!

But I find I am able to appreciate the other point of view, too, which I have tried to put into words below. I wonder what Elisabet would think?

Here she is in an 1860 portrait by Friedrich Kaulbach. She was born in Germany and that, perhaps, explains why we have a very European-looking castle right here in the middle of Texas. She stands by one of her busts and holds a carving tool in her hand. And I love her gaze into our own eyes. Does she not look like a woman who would carry on in spite of everything? Does she not look like a woman who would build a castle in the middle of Texas?

The historical preservationists want to make this piece of ground look like the much more barren prairie that it was when Elisabet built her castle here. Back then the castle was not hidden from view by the trees that hide it now. It had a fence made of cedar posts and chicken wire, and I think there was little else. It was a strange, remote, feudal-age, medieval castle looming up out of nowhere. In the middle of nowhere.

The preservationists want anyone coming upon this castle to be able to have the experience of seeing it in its 1900 landscape.

Neighbors are jumping in on both sides of the wall. We have a neighborhood newsletter, and emails are pouring in. One person wrote that we should tear down the trees and the wall and the gate and the sculptures and the castle and recreate the landscape to look as it did before the Europeans discovered the Americas. Another person said he had had a séance with Elisabet and she had told him personally that she liked the wall and the trees.

It's been wonderful to be momentarily diverted from the greater issues of the day.

Although it did occur to me, speaking of the greater issues of the century, that two reasons for leaving both the trees and the wall in tact are (1) that our planet needs the trees and (2) that we really do not need to be expending energy removing a perfectly good wall when we should be conserving energy instead. 

For now the gate is closed and barred.

I don't know what will come of all of this, but, for some reason, it has made me remember the Victorian haunted house, Grace Hall Episcopal Girls Dormitory, that I lived in as a freshman and a sophomore at The University of Texas. It was a relic then, and it has been long gone for many years.

I can't help but wish that some historical preservationist had saved Grace Hall so that I could wander through it now. I hope there is a heaven for old houses that have been torn down and carted away, and that one day we will be reunited with them and will be able to walk inside them again.

Meanwhile there is a new call to add to Save the Whales and Save the Earth:

 
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A Brouhaha in the Kingdom

This castle was once the home of Elisabet Ney, a famous sculptress. It stands only four blocks from where I live, a fact that always astounds me whenever I stop to think about it.

Elisabet and my husband share the same birthday, and so he honored her birthday one year by putting her in one of his flying machines and letting her soar right out of her own castle grounds, leaving a jet trail behind her, a little wake of unidentified flying lights.

His caption reads: Elisabet takes a ride on her birthday. My husband is a computer artist (among other things) and I never know what is going to happen to reality when he starts composing on the computer. Something is always sure to take off in flight.

Awhile back I told you here about how I could not make myself enter the grounds of Elisabet's castle. Someone was sleeping beneath a tree, and I had crept back out of the gate, without getting the photos I had hoped for.

A couple of weeks after I had failed to get my castle photos, my husband and I went back together, and just in time, too, because now no one can go onto the castle grounds, for a whole different reason.

A great brouhaha is brewing!

(And don't you just love that word? Brouhaha! I have never ever used it before!)

But just before all the commotion began, we were able to get almost the same view from the front as the photo used in Elisabet's birthday ride. The main entrance is to the far left. The castle is made of native limestone, and you can see that it is blackened in many places now and needs to be scrubbed clean again.

I came in closer to the main entrance, for there is something in one of the limestones that I want to show you.

There is a sign with a blue border to the left of the tall brown double-doors. And if you look above this sign, in the second stone just above the top of the blue border, there is a face carved into that stone.

You will have to use almost pure imagination to make it out from here, so I went in even closer.

Here it is, the face of a young girl, with her own hair folded around her head like a cloak. But her cloak of hair has not been able to protect her from all the weather or from all the hands that have touched her for some 100 years. I don't know if Elisabet asked that this sculpted girl be allowed to slowly disappear from too much rain and too much wind and too many loving hands, but I love this little face all the more for its living and dying as we mere mortals do, for braving the elements, for dissolving into some immense invisibility. 

Well, I thought I would be returning to go inside the castle and give you the grand tour. But I haven't been keeping up with neighborhood news.

The castle is now in the throes of a great restoration, both inside and outside. And by outside, not only are the outside walls of the castle being repaired, but all the surrounding grounds are being restored as well.

And herein lies the reason for the brouhaha.

In the interest of historical preservation, how far back in time should you go to restore something to the way it once was?

The plans for this particular historical preservation project have divided the neighborhood into two (possibly warring) camps.

For here is what is at risk. This beautiful iron gate and the stone wall that spans the whole front of the property were not here when Elisabet lived here. Nor were some 50 trees that were planted on the grounds after her death in 1907 in honor of her or that found their way to this site by sprouting on their own.

Do these trees, the gate, and the stone wall have to be torn down or can they stay?

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Home Sweet Home

I have always loved the phrase "home sweet home," but it took me by surprise today when I stopped to study my own version of "Home Sweet Home" in this greeting card that I made some ten years ago.

I didn't think about it at the time, but I see now that I distilled the idea of home into the things that are the most important to me: a stack of books, a comfy place in which to sit to read the books, a lamp to give enough light in order to see to read the books, paintings on the walls for art, and a heart for love. And I do notice now that I have not one but two comfy chairs and two lamps ~ for the companionship of family and friends.

To give the card a border, I set it against a black-flowered cloth, as if I were trying to set my home inside the dark of night, but it is a nighttime in which flowers bloom. The "paintings" on the wall are flowers cut out of this very same cloth ~ I must have wanted to bring this dark wild-flowered night inside, too.

I have put books at the very heart of my home, and even now, ten years later, looking at this stack, I find myself bemused by my own titles. Not surprised, but amused at myself. Nursery rhymes and fairy tales! I have obviously never given up my love of my first reading experiences. I'm not sure about where the "Owl Mystery" comes from, except that I love mysteries (of all kinds ~ whodunits and Stonehenge and The Big Bang and the eleven-day disappearance of Agatha Christie in 1926), and I love wild creatures, hence the owl.

Well, there's not one cookbook here, and not one book on home decorating. There's not one piece of kitchenware in my version of Home Sweet Home, either. Not one single pot or pan, although I do remember wondering if I could fit in a fire in a fireplace and deciding (sigh) that there wasn't enough room.

Two of the books are positioned not from a view of their spines but from a view of their pages. I remember how puzzling it was to try to make tiny pieces of paper look like a book with pages. The "pages" are simply pencil lines drawn on white paper which is wedged in between very thin U-shaped pieces of colored paper intended to look like the covers of the books. It is a kind of sleight of hand with paper. I see these books as journals for writing in.

And the little stool? It's what I discovered is called a "cricket stool," a very small child-sized stool with an oval top and splayed legs, like a cricket. I found it mentioned in one sentence in a Martha Grimes mystery:

"He looked away, toward the cricket stool where he imagined the house-ghost stirring the ashes."

But now I'm wondering what would you put in a greeting card to show what you would want the most in your "Home Sweet Home?"

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The Last Train

The Last Train by Kim Lewis is much more than a story about a ghost of a train that makes one last run across tracks that aren't there anymore. You'd think that would be enough of a story right there! But Kim Lewis, the author and illustrator, does something much more profound in this very lovely and magical children's picture book.

Even the cover art shows that something "out of the box" is happening, for the steam from the train billows right out of the framed illustration and off the edges of the cover ~ into space.

Two children, Sara and James, find an old hut where the railroad men used to have their coffee when they were working on the tracks. The hut is in ruins. But it is here that the children begin to imagine the last train.

Sara and James coax their parents into helping them fix up the old railway hut. They work together all day until Sara hangs a red handkerchief on the old fireplace, and "a crack of lightning split the hot air just as low rumbles swelled from the hills."

And the last train comes thundering in out of the thunderstorm.

Only the children see the last train. But it is made very real not only in the illustrations, but also in the words. That night when they tell their parents that they saw the last train, what do Mom and Dad reply?

"Of course you did . . ." they said and smiled.

I love it that what these two children saw is sanctioned in this book. It is not written off as only a dream, or only the thunderstorm, or only imagination.

Only imagination!

Now there's a thought to ponder ~ as if something that is "only imagination" is less than something that is "real."  I can remember how I felt as a child when I came to the end of a story and found out that "it was only a dream." I always felt so disappointed. Betrayed, even.

So I really love finding children's stories where imagination is allowed to be real. It makes me stop to think that it is in the imagination of scientists and artists and thinkers of every ilk that our world is imagined and re-imagined, made and re-made, invented and reinvented, in ways that 8th century or 18th century peoples would have never imagined, to put a very bold point upon the word "imagined."

Well, as far as I can tell, this wonderful children's picture book is out of print, but there are four copies available in the Austin Public Library, so I am hoping that you can find a copy in your local library, too, and there's a good chance you might be able to find used copies on Amazon. If you scroll down "below the fold" on the Amazon page for this book, you will find reviews by School Library Journal and Kirkus. The back of the book itself says "Age 4 and up," but Kirkus says "3+" and School Library Journal says "Kindergarten-Grade 3."

I love The Last Train because it is written in words that would be just as wonderful to find in an adult novel, but somehow it is even more wonderful to find them here in a children's picture book. 

You can also find more books by Kim Lewis on her website here.

And I hope your weekend is full of trains, either real or imagined, and that at least one of your trains takes you to that most wonderful of all destinations: Imagination. A place on the map of the world well worth the journey ~ anytime!

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