"I guess I acted on instinct"

A thief attempts to pick the pocket of a 72-year-old man. This particular septuagenarian is an ex-ironworker, Marine and Golden Gloves boxer. What happens next will probably not surprise you.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

As long as I'm talking about books for kids, I might as well give a little "shout out" (as if she needed one, or would know what one was if she got one) to Laura Ingalls Wilder. My older daughter and I are now working through "These Happy Golden Years," the last of the Little House books. (We haven't quite worked through all the earlier ones, but now we'll have the pleasure of going back and doing so). Here's the end of the last chapter we read tonight:

I would like to go West," he told Ma one day. "A fellow doesn't have room to breathe here any more."

"Oh, Charles! No room, with all this great prairie around you?" Ma said. "I was so tired of being dragged from pillar to post, and I thought we were settled here."

"Well, I guess we are Caroline. Don't fret. It's just that my wandering foot gets to itching, I guess. Anyway, I haven't won that bet with Uncle Sam yet, and we stay right here till we win it! I can prove up on this homestead claim."

Laura knew how he felt for she saw the look in his blue eyes as he gazed over the rolling prairie westward from the open door where he stood. He must stay in a settled country for the sake of them all, just as she must teach school again, though she did so hate to be shut into a schoolroom.

I've heard plenty about how reading Laura Ingalls Wilder to kids is not a good idea because, among other reasons, all the women in her stories are subjugated to the men. But note here how Laura identifies her own sacrifice -- she is willing to do something she dislikes, teaching school, so that her blind sister can continue in college -- with her father's relinquishing his desire to move further westward, because he knows it would be detrimental to family life. There is a very egalitarian sharing of burdens in these books, which I suspect was mirrored in the sacrifices made by the families moving west those many years ago.

Letting Swift River Go

Every once in awhile, you grab a book for the kids at the library that turns out to be a real pleasure. It happened tonight with "Letting Swift River Go," by Jane Yolen, with beautiful illustrations by Barbara Cooney. In the late 1930's, the Swift River Valley in Massachusetts was flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir. Four towns, Dana, Enfield, Greenwich and Prescott, were lost, their residents displaced. The graveyards were dug up; centuries-old houses were destroyed. "Letting Swift River Go" is the story of one little girl, Sally Jane, and how she feels about losing the place where she grew up -- the backyard where she caught fireflies, the church where she was baptized, the roads where she used to walk to school.

In the end, years later, she goes out on the new reservoir on a rowboat with her now elderly father. He points into the water: "Look, Sally Jane, that's where the road to Prescott ran ... there's the road to Beaver Brook ... that's the spot where the church stood ... and the school, and the Grange Hall, and the Old Stone Mill." She feels the regret. But then, she remembers what her mother told her, years back, when she was catching fireflies: "You have to let them go, Sally Jane." And, she concludes, "I looked down into the darkening deep, smiled, and did."

There are no cheap political points, just a focus on how Sallly Jane deals with events beyond her control. When you love a place or a thing very dearly, and you lose it, how do you cope? How do you keep cherished things in your memory without allowing the loss of them to drag you into hopelessness? These are questions kids will eventually need to face, and this book provides at least a starting point to answering them. Not bad.