Directory of 2011 Blog Entries

Mother West Wind

May 12 2012

In March this year we had a week of summer, when the temperature rose to eighty degrees and the ice that covered the beaver pond in our backyard began to melt. One day Don glanced out the kitchen window, saw splashing in the melted area, hollered for me, and we watched a sleek round head appear.

I said, “That’s Little Joe Otter!”

The name always comes to me automatically whenever we see an otter, because the first otter I ever met was in the pages of a Mother West Wind book and his name was Little Joe.

Don said, “Look.”

Another head popped out of the water. More splashing, much play.

Long ago I had learned from Thornton Burgess in his Mother West Wind books that otters love to frolic. They sure do. In winter we’ve even watched them go watersliding down an icy bank into a pool of open water near the shore, just like the mud-bank sliding I recall that Little Joe did.

Today, these two otters now climbed up on the ice. Don asked, “What’s the name of the other one?”

As usual I told him that if there was any otter in Mother West Wind other than Little Joe, I couldn’t remember.

But I could remember some of the other names in the Mother West Wind series that our grandparents gave my sister and me, books that were first read to us by our parents and then read by us on our own. A skunk to me will always be Jimmy Skunk. A mink is Billy Mink. A fox is Reddy Fox. A breeze is one of the Merry Little Breezes.

Besides these books, I also read about the Mother West Wind world in Thornton Burgess’s column in my mother’s Boston Globe. My friend Gwen’s memories go back into the past even deeper, for she is ninety-eight and remembers as a child reading the Burgess stories in her father’s Boston Herald.

After Don’s question, I wanted to refresh my memory about names, but the books from childhood were long gone, so until I could get to the library to see what they had I went online and rediscovered Jerry Muskrat, Paddy the Beaver, Johnny Chuck, Bobby Raccoon, Chatterer the Red Squirrel, Danny Meadow Mouse, Tufty the Linx, Hooty the Owl, Blacky the Crow, Sammy Jay, et al. (In my childhood, did it strike me that this was a boys’ club of creatures? If so, I accepted it. Wasn’t The Wind in the Willows peopled by Mole, Ratty, Mr. Toad, and Mr. Badger? But the books I remember rereading most often had heroines, from Raggedy Ann to Alice and Wendy.)
                                                                                         Continued . . .

 

Neighborhood Stoves

February 8 2012

The other day a new acquaintance stopped by, entering by the kitchen door, not the front door, of course. Then she stood stock-still and asked, “Is that one of those stoves that’s a heater?”

Don said proudly, “A Magee.”

She said, “We’ve got one at our camp. It came with the camp when we bought the place. I’ve never ever seen another one.”

Don and I laughed, and Don said, “Our neighborhood is full of them!”

He exaggerated a bit, but . . .

                                                                                                Continued . . .