From the Annual Easter Egg Hunt to My Favorite Children's Books--five books I remember fondly

Very shortly, as soon as we get our trinket-prizes collected, the Third Annual C&C Easter Egg Hunt will begin. This egg hunt is not a casual look for hard-boiled eggs in the grass, but a serious week- (or more) length search for plastic eggs cleverly hidden around the house. Each of us will hide ten of these--blue, purple, or green--and then hunt for the others whenever we have a bit of spare time.

I love this event. I love the clever hiding places (my husband is the master of hiding eggs in plain sight, and my daughter tucked some away that could have stayed hidden for months if we hadn't begged to know where they were) and I love to seek. Systematically.

The Great Easter Egg Hunt is also when I do some of my most thorough cleaning. After all, if I pull everything off a pantry shelf and wipe it down and then replace everything with careful attention, I ought to be quite confident that there are no eggs hiding on that shelf, right?

This hunting-cleaning invariably makes me think of the chapter “Dusting Is Fun” in All-of-a-kind Family (by Sydney Taylor). Mama, tired of constantly having to remind her daughters when it is their turn to dust the front room, hides ten buttons in the room and tells them they are going to play a game. The game is find the buttons, obviously, but while dusting. It's Sarah's turn, and by paying attention to all those difficult-to-reach spots, she finds them all.

Mama is wise enough not to make the game permanent. After everyone has had a turn, she only puts the buttons out occasionally, without warning, and in varying numbers. And once--a penny! A whole penny! (And for them, a penny buys a significant quantity of candy.)

Just recently, I was making a list of books from my childhood that I particularly liked and wanted to give to a friend's daughter. (See also my post on books, nostalgia, and death.) After settling on Little House in the Big Woods (Laura Ingalls Wilder), Understood Betsy (Dorothy Canfield Fisher), Beezus and Ramona (Beverly Cleary), The Book of Three (Lloyd Alexander), and the aforementioned All-of-a-kind Family, I started wondering: why those books? How had those books influenced me, and how might they have influenced my writing?

It struck me that all the parents and guardians in those books had a streak of practicality, a kind of matter-of-fact common sense.  Mama handles chore-shirking, lost library books, bouts of stubbornness, and scarlet fever with admirable calm (which I admire even more now that I am a mother myself). And though I always thought Laura's Ma was a touch too proper, she not only knows how to make everything from rag dolls to butter to straw hats, she also occasionally loosens her rules, allowing the girls to mold their cooked pumpkin into shapes, though normally they aren’t allowed to play with food, or (in a later book) declaring that they will play games instead of studying when she knows they are desperately worried about Pa and in need of distraction.

The Putney cousins, in Understood Betsy, are the calm contrast to devoted but fluttery Aunt Frances. They say almost nothing about to Betsy about how upsetting it must be to be whisked away from her family to a strange place, but it’s easy to imagine that Aunt Abigail is thinking, "Poor mite. What would make her feel better?" just before she scoops up the kitten and drops it in Betsy's lap. And a few words from Aunt Abigail at bedtime, "do you know, I think it's going to be real nice, having a little girl in the house again," makes it clear that she is welcome.

The Book of Three is set in Prydain, a land of high kings, evil lords, enchanted swords, and deathless warriors. But Taran is frustrated that his life is far too ordinary—“I think there is a destiny laid on me that I am not to know anything interesting, go anywhere interesting, or do anything interesting. I’m certainly not to be anything. I’m not anything even at Caer Dallben!”. His guardian Coll obligingly responds by giving him the title of "Assistant Pig-Keeper” to Hen-Wen, the oracular pig. Taran is to “see her trough is full, carry her water, and give her a good scrubbing every other day.” When Taran points out that he does all those things already, Coll says, "All the better, for it makes things that much easier." 

Beezus and Ramona was not, strictly speaking, one of my childhood favorites. I read a lot of Beverly Cleary's books and enjoyed them, but I didn't fully appreciate them until I read the Ramona books to my daughter. Ramona's world is the most similar to mine of the five books, and yet Cleary manages to make it incredibly entertaining by focusing on the little things--how a bored but imaginative younger sibling can interfere with baking, or the way the first bite of something is somehow the best--and turning them into adventures. Ramona is definite challenge to the adults around her, as well as her sister, but they find practical ways to deal with her (buy a cake rather than try for the third time to make one, don’t mention the apple incident as it would feed her desire for attention, and—oh—why not make applesauce out of those apples?)

Am I making too much of this? Perhaps all childhood books are like this, especially those for younger children. After all, it is reassuring to think that parents are wise and calm. Probably most stories have some character with that quality. But not all children's books feature the parents particularly (Secrets of Droon, for instance) and not all parents are good (Matilda, for a rather drastic exception).

At any rate, did reading these books lead me to be a sensible and matter-of-fact parent? It left me with the aspiration, certainly--I think I yell too much and get flustered too easily to actually qualify. In my defense, I'm not a fictional character.

I suspect the fondness for sensible parent/guardians does show up in my writing, though. In Persephone, Aunt Sarah and Aunt Mira are both practical in their own different ways. In Adrift, Aunt Kenata manages new babies and bad dreams, in contrast to the easily-upset Aunt Visala and taciturn Utanu. And I think Nana Sylvie might qualify as the common-sense influence in The Slipper Ball, though time will tell.

Till next post.