Writing Up A Storm

Looking into Pockets

This is the pocket on my mother's favorite apron. The animals have faded, but I can still make them out: a moose, cow, polar bear, cat, and reindeer, a little duck to the side, and a couple of red-feathered birds above. This might be a nod to the story of the ark, although there is only one of each animal, and it appears to be snowing rather than raining.

My mother wore an apron every day of her life. In her last ten years here in Austin with me, she would put her apron on in the morning to protect her clothing while she did the crossword puzzle, and she didn't take it off unless she went out. I did her laundry, and this is the apron I washed the most for her.

Another reason my mother wore an apron was for the pocket. She kept a stash of tissues in it. Her apron pocket was often her only pocket, and when she took it off, she was pocketless.

We women have gotten the vote, but we are still far behind in getting pockets.

I wrote a story a while back about a mountain woman who wore a dress with tote-bag-size pockets. I often like to create props for my stories, to show to children or to jump-start my own imagination, so I made the mountain woman's dress with its gigantic pockets, gathered along the top edge to increase the volume.

And aren't these very fine pockets?

When paper girl saw them, she wanted just such a pocket, too. I tried to explain they were actually a little large, and we had a long talk about the use of exaggeration in literature, but she gave me this look as if to say that literary devices had nothing to do with her.

And speaking of literature, I think she has been dipping into my hoard of old nursery rhymes. This one comes to mind:

Please give her a pocket
sewed into her smocklet
with buttons to lock it,
for keeping the moon and the sun,
or the stars, one by one,
or feathers from flocklets
and blueprints of rockets,
for who knows what will come
from her having had pockets?

And any day now she'll be wanting a pocket doll, too, to put into her pocket.

A Pocket Doll from The Ragtime Doll Company

I have a sweet reader who owns The Ragtime Doll Company, located in northern Maine and western New Brunswick. Ragtime Dolls offers patterns for recreating old-fashioned rag dolls, including this precious pocket doll, and some miniature doll-size patterns for traditional American quilts, such as "Rail Fence" and "Honey Bee."

The little pocket doll captured my heart, all tucked into her pocket bed, with her clothing hanging from buttons. And it all folds up into a little folded pocket.

This reminded me of a tiny one-inch doll that I had once, lost forever now in that place where lost things go. I must have been about eight or nine when this doll was mine. It was bubblegum-pink, with moveable legs and arms, so I could make it sit with its little arms outstretched, reaching for me.

It needed a bed, and I got the idea that a powder puff would make the perfect bed. I have this huge memory of being in a five-and-dime store with my very own change in my hand, picking out a pinkish powder puff, and walking up to the counter all alone, my little heart beating with an outrageous fear and trembling.

Since I was not allowed to wear makeup nor to smoke, I thought that powder puffs were in the same category as cigarettes, and that I would never be allowed to buy one. I might even be arrested for trying to buy one! But the lady at the counter took my money and handed me the powder puff, and I ran all the way home, still expecting to be found out. What a terrible risk I took to make sure my tiny doll slept in such a cloud of luxury!

All of this is to say how precious pocket dolls are, and to urge you to peek at the pocket doll here from The Ragtime Doll Company.

A dear friend of mine made these sweet little pocket dolls for me to show me the kind of dolls she played with as a child. These are made from miniature shampoo or lotion bottles, the kind you get in hotels. They are a reminder of how little it takes to make an imaginary world for a child.

An empty bottle, a scrap of fabric, a piece of yarn, a length of ribbon, a secret hiding place inside a pocket . . .

Which brings us to the great question posed in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings:

"What has it got in its pocketses?"

"Setting Sail in a Pocket"

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Lost: One Paper Girl

I lost my paper girl last week. It happened like this:

First, I decided to make a dragon, but I couldn't find my old paper dragon from years ago. All I could find was this claw-footed tub from an illustration for a children's book I started several years ago and never finished. The tub is made out of white paper, a tiny piece of silver gift-wrapping paper for the faucet, the corner of a terry-cloth washcloth, and tiny scraps of yellow and orange paper for the little duck.

I found the claw-footed tub because I had used the claw feet for the dragon. All of which got me no closer to finding the dragon.

I was forced to design a new dragon from scratch, which has turned out to be a good thing because I am finding some wonderful dragon details I had omitted before, like that arrow-shaped pointy tip on the tail. I had finally sketched the first pencil draft of a new dragon when I realized I wanted the dragon to be of a size that would fit the paper girl. So I went looking for her.

And couldn't find her anywhere.

After I had looked in all the logical places, and then the impossible places, I sat at my desk with that feeling you get when you can't find your wallet. I wondered if I could possibly recreate her so that she would be just the same? I didn't think I could. I didn't even have a hard copy of her, or a tracing.

Could I go running out to my husband with my tearful plea for help? What would 911 say? Would anyone understand how bereft I felt?

She's only six inches tall, I thought. She's too tiny to fend for herself in the real world. I pictured her in the recycle bucket, but it was too terrible a thought to contemplate.

I even tried to hurtle myself through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, but couldn't manage to get out of denial.

Suddenly, I went looking for rabbit, and couldn't find rabbit, either! At least they're together, I thought. But where? where?

Where had I seen them last? It didn't hit me until I realized that Watch the dog was missing, too. Oh, oh! The last time I had seen the paper girl, she and rabbit and Watch were hurrying off into the world.

I lifted the lid of the scanner, and, yes, yes, there they all were!

Oh, I felt the most wonderful sense of reprieve! Never mind that they were all clearly miffed at me. Such tossing of heads and flipping of ears and licking of paws. Such dark glances in my direction!

And I'm afraid this is all to say that I am spending most of my time these days looking for lost things. I have three posts in the making, none of which I have been able to complete because of lost things: one lost book (paperback, thin), one lost pocket doll (one inch tall, pink), one lost dragon (paper, purple), and, most importantly, one lost energy reserve (not sure what it looks like but I want it back).

I know I have slowed down to a snail's pace, but I'm actually very busy looking for things.

Oh, now, wait just a minute! Surely, the glass on my scanner is not so dirty that lying on it for several days straight requires a bath! Or does it? 

Well, I am off to wash the sheets and do the breakfast dishes and clean the glass on the scanner. And then I will continue my search for lost things.

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The Boxcar Children & Elspeth

1942 Cover Art of The Boxcar Children, written by Gertrude Chandler Warner,
illustrated by L. Kate Deal

Ever since I started this little blog, The Boxcar Children has been waiting its turn to be featured here. You can find out more about this book here. It was always my intention to link my post about this classic children’s book with Elspeth Thompson’s wonderful blog about making a home out of two Victorian railway carriages.

Elspeth's blog has been on my sidebar from the very first under "Blogs That Got Me Started." I did not know her personally, but she and I shared a number of comments with each other. We both loved poetry and children's books about trains.

But then I learned that Elspeth had suddenly died.

I was in the middle of “Looking Into Cupboards,” and thinking about “Looking into Pockets” next, when I learned about Elspeth’s death, and I’ve been on a long detour through the deep dark woods ever since.  Her death made me want to go back the beginning and to think about all the moments in our lives when we go one way and not another.

For this beautiful, talented, vibrant, and much-beloved woman took her own life. She was only 48 years old. She left behind her husband, her ten-year-old daughter, her hopes and dreams.

At first I thought I would not try to write about Elspeth at all, for I don’t know what to say. But I could not stop thinking about her. So then I thought I would just go ahead with my post about The Boxcar Children anyway, and see where it took me.

The illustrations are not in the public domain. The only one I felt I could use is the top one featured here because it was on the 1942 cover, but I felt Ms. Deal's beautiful black and white illustrations were essential to my writing about this book, so I made little replicas of the ones that I wanted to show you.

I was actually very much taken aback as I reread this book and worked at making my own paper cut-outs of these beloved illustrations, for I realized how much this little book must have contributed to my own love of the black and white silhouette.

And as I looked for clues to Elspeth, the very first thing that struck me was a repeating phrase: “against the odds.”

The Boxcar Children is often described as a story about four children who survive against the odds. And Elspeth’s last project, which she had only just started, was a brand-new website titled "Gardening Against the Odds.”

So I thought I would put my finger on this phrase, "against the odds," and with it in mind, begin where The Boxcar Children begins:

"One warm night four children stood in front of a bakery. No one knew them. No one knew where they had come from."

This is a very powerful way to begin a children's story. I have used this for years as a model for how to begin my own stories with words that are both simple and mysterious at the same time.

This is my very rough cut-out of Ms. Deal's illustration of the children finding the boxcar in the woods in the middle of a thunderstorm.

There are many orphans in children's literature, but usually they are living with a relative or in a school. They are not all alone in the woods.

It is this idea of children surviving all alone, against all odds, that makes this little story so appealing. And so powerful.

Apparently, when it first came out, some librarians would not have it on their shelves, for they were afraid it would entice children to run off to the woods and become wild things!

This is Watch, the dog, a stray who finds them in the woods, limping with a thorn in one paw. I love it that four children, who have almost nothing to eat themselves, take this dog into their care and share their food with him. He, in turn, becomes their watch-dog.

The children are Henry, the oldest, Jessie next, and then Violet who is ten, and Benny who is five. While Henry goes into the nearest town to try to get odd jobs, the other children explore an old dump where they find all that they need to set up home in the boxcar.

Here is my own cut-paper version of the shelf with all their findings. It is this part of the book that I used to "play" over and over in our damp old basement with my two brothers and sister. There were four of us, too, and I used to beg my siblings to play "The Boxcar Children" with me.

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I gathered together some odds and ends (above) to try to replicate the illustration of the bowls and cups on the shelf in The Boxcar Children. This is what our little shelf in the basement might have looked like, so long ago, when we played at being all alone in the world.

Our mother would give us saltine crackers and little boxes of raisins to "live on" in our basement-boxcar. And we plundered the kitchen cupboards for cups and bowls and a jug and a teapot, so that we, too, could survive against the odds.

Here is Jessie stirring a stew with a big spoon. My mother (alas!) would not let us recreate this particular scene in our backyard, but I imagined it a thousand times in my daydreams.

And when I go camping now, and bend over a campfire, there is Jessie, too, forever stirring her big pot of stew.

And there are the four children forever finding blueberries in the woods, and making pine-needle beds, and washing their chipped and cracked dishes in a little stream.

Ms. Warner was a teacher, and she worked hard to make this book easily readable for young children. Most third graders can read it independently.

And because this one first book was so popular, Ms. Warner wrote 18 sequels, and about 100 more books have been added to the series by other authors.

As a child, I read two or three of the sequels, but they did not have the magic of the first book, for in the sequels the children had the safety-net of their rich grandfather. They were no longer all alone in the woods. They no longer had to depend on only the things that they had brought with them in a laundry bag or that they could scrounge for themselves.

It is the first book that is so absolutely pitch-perfect. I would read it through to the end, and then turn right back to page one and begin all over again.

And it is here that I put my finger upon Elspeth and find the same perfection in her.

However much we long for a hundred sequels to Elspeth, nothing can take away the fact of her total and absolute perfection as she was in the one life that she lived. We will write the sequels for her, as others did for Ms. Warner. We will make gardens that will thrive against the odds in forbidding and barren places. We will carry on for her. 

Most of us have faced some dark night of the soul of our own. I have spent a lifetime buffeted between great tidal waves of both faith and doubt. But Elspeth faced a darker night than I have ever known. And no matter how much we long to sit with her during that great dark night of her soul and somehow pull her back from the edge, we cannot.

I wish I had written my review of The Boxcar Children for Elspeth in time to give it to her, but perhaps it is never too late to give a gift.

I don't know if she knew about The Boxcar Children, but I know she would love it that here and there all around the world, on any given day, children are playing "The Boxcar Children" and thereby practicing how to survive against the odds because of Gertrude Chandler Warner.

And, likewise, here and there all around the world little gardens are thriving against the odds because of Elspeth Thompson.

Let us take Elspeth with us in our hearts and go forth then into the world and find our own ways to survive and thrive against the odds.

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Sneak Peek: The Dog

My helpers have managed to catch Watch the dog for my Boxcar Children post, although Watch seems to be the one who is in charge.

I am somewhere far far behind, trying to catch up. I am so sorry that I have not been able to visit any of your lovely blogs this week. Or to publish a new post yet. When I said I wanted to let go, I did not really mean to fall off the edge of the world!! 

I don't even know what has so consumed my time, just a hundred little things that needed doing. I promise to be back on track very very soon. . .

Sneak Peek: Boxcar

After I looked into cupboards a couple of posts back, I fully intended to look into pockets, but I got diverted temporarily, and now I find that I must look into The Boxcar Children before I do anything else. However, the illustrations that I want to use are not yet in the public domain, so I am making my own out of cut-paper, and it is taking me so much longer than I thought it would. 

I have a lot of help, as you can see, so I should be back in a very few days with a new post. See you soon!!