Naming Things

I brought my camera with me this morning as I walked the 6.5 miles around the lake, all the while wishing I knew the names of the plants and blooming trees. So many colors. So many varieties. So many names unknown to me.

In Cynthia DeFelice's new book, Nelly May Has Her Say, the main character is befuddled by the many names for things she must learn. The English folktale "Master of All Masters" is the basis for this humorous story. Nelly May is the oldest daughter in a family of 13 children. Because her family needs assistance, the girl sets off for the hill-top home of Lord Ignasius Pinkwinkle to ask for employment as a servant girl. Once there, she is in awe of the home and furnishing but even more awed by the terminology the lord demands she use. "I have special names for things, and I expect you to use them whenever you speak to me," he tells her. 

Nelly expects to make the lord's bed every day but is instructed to call it the "resftul slumberific". Trousers are "long-legged limberjohns." Boots are "stompinwhackers." Fire is "flaming pop-and-sizzle." The dog is a "fur-faced fluffenbarker," and the dog's tail is a "wigger-wagger." The list goes on and on...and the girl gets more and more frustrated. When she must use the strange terminology in an emergency, she realizes her Most Excellent of All Masters needs to employ someone other than the "fuzzy-dust-and-fooder" he got in her. It will make a most excellent read-aloud selection in the fall.

Appropriately Themed Book

With May comes the blooming of my favorite flower - the lily of the valley. I love looking inside the bell-shaped blossoms! May also brings invitations to celebrate graduations. For those, I love making cards and choosing gifts for each person. 

This year, several graduates will receive Barbara Kerley's new book The World is Waiting for You. Published by National Geographic, it is a book filled with captivating photographs, each accompanied by words that encourage - and even challenge - exploration, discovery, questioning, and observation. The carefully selected images complement the text. "Dig deeper" rests on the page of an archaeologist uncovering bones. "Poke around for a while" sits below a beam of selenite in the Cave of Crystals in Naica, Chihuahua, Mexico. Best of all, the origins of the photographs are described in a photo glossary at the end. It is an excellent book for celebrating the paths we follow and the risks we take...and simply beautiful to view.

Too Many?

There were so many reserved books waiting for me at the library yesterday! I was glad I took at least one bag with me to carry them. I even left a few there to pick up this weekend - and to give myself some time to finish a few already at home.

Today I read a few of the thin volumes and paged through Vegetable Literacy by Deborah Madison (which I will write about more later). But I have been consumed with reading The Fever Tree by Jennifer McVeigh. Set in 1877 in London and in South Africa, it is the story of Frances Irvine, a young woman whose father has died, leaving her to contemplate her future. She decides to accept the proposal of a distant cousin and travels by steamer to the Southern Hemisphere. En route, she experiences an unexpected relationship with a man who is also going there, but the two are of quite different social classes. Once there, she discovers her husband and the life he provides for her are filled with contradictions and moral choices. Add to this the diamond mining by powerful Englishmen, the severe mistreatment of the native people, and the denial (and cover-up) of the smallpox epidemic. 

In her author's note, she talks about reading journals and diaries written by those who lived through that horrific time...all housed at the British Library.

Thanks to the Fan Club!

It seems like an annual event (timed to be near my birthday) now...receiving a mystery package from the Extended Shelf Life Fan Club. What arrived in today's mail was most carefully packaged in two bubble mailers and wrapped in smooth, silvery paper. It felt like a book! It was a book! A most extraordinary book which combines my love of baking, art, and stories!

I gasped when I saw the cover of Modern Art Desserts: Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Confections, and Frozen Treats Based on Iconic Works of Art by Caitlin Freeman! A Mondrian cake is the cover feature. Like a true librarians, I quickly flipped to the table of contents where thumbnails of the desserts accompany the recipe names and page numbers. Whom would I most imagine to be featured in a book of this title? Wayne Thiebaud, of course. And there are four cakes modeled after his art! 

Oh, will I ever love reading the stories and recipes...and then attempting to make some of the art-inspired desserts myself. I am a grateful writer today for this surprise gift. Thank you.

Killer Librarian

My yoga class meets at 5:20 on Thursdays, and most of the women in the class are educators. There is a sense of peaceful relief at 6:20 when class ends, but prior to 5:20, the discussion usually centers on books and learning. Last week, one person commented that it would be nice just to talk with each other for an hour! I did take one book recommendation from that class, and I am almost done with Mary Lou Kirwin's Killer Librarian.

Karen Nash is a Minnesota librarian who goes on a journey to London despite having been dumped by her boyfriend of four years the night prior to departure. At the airport, her recent ex and his new, much younger, much thinner, blond girlfriend are also there! Alas, she is saved by being in first class and can only ruminate over her anger. Once there, she stays at the B & B she booked and is befriended by Caldwell, the owner. While having a few pints at a local pub (something Karen has never done in her life), she confesses her secret desire to murder Dave, that awful ex. Little does she know, that guy named Guy has connections with the seedier crowd.

There is just something about this playful murder mystery that has kept me reading the past two days...perhaps it is all the literary connections or perhaps the thickening plot and incriminating evidence are teasing my deducitve mind.

I did note that the author is also known as Mary Logue, writer of the lovely Caldecott Honor Book Sleep Like a Tiger!

Licking Stamps

I love stamps. Each time I visit the post office, I inevitably buy more, just because a new design is so clever or lovely. My mom and I maintain a strong handwritten correspondence (since I left home for college almost 28 years ago), and I have saved every letter. Partly because the letters contain our history and partly because I love the stamps. Despite the opinions of naysayers, I think sending a letter is a good thing. I do not know a single person who does not like to receive a real letter in the mail (as opposed to junk mail or bills).

Eben McAllister, the main character in Betty Birney's book The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs, is on a quest for seven wonders in his small town. Having been transfixed with the images and descriptions of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, he was challenged by his father to find seven in Sassafras Springs, Missouri. If Eben can do it, his father will buy a train ticket for him to visit cousins in Silver Peak, Colorado. The year is 1923, and Eben believes if there were wonders to be found, he would have known about them by now. Still, he cannot resist the possibility of travel.

When he reaches the leaning-to-the-right shack of a man named Cully Pone (whose trousers are held up by a piece of rope and still hang dangerously low), Cully immediately claims to have a wonder...."the doggone doggonedest" of wonders, in fact. Eben listens to the fascinating story of a rainmaker who came to a Missouri county after years of drought, when the creek was so dry there was not enough there to wet a postage stamp. That is when the fourth grade listeners look at me with curiosity. They have licked envelopes, but stamps simply come from that sheet, like stickers. I explain that we used to have to lick stamps...and not that long ago either (or at least it seems that way to me).

With only 12 school days remaining, I regret that we will only join Eben for his discovery of three wonders. The readers will need to check out the book from the library this summer to finish the story.

Nothing New

The second graders have just finished listening to chapter five of Robert McCloskey's Homer Price. Because the book was published in 1943, I have to stop often to explain terms or concepts foreign to them. Uncle Ulysses' Lunch Room is not like the lunch room but more like a diner. Men often congregated at the barber shop. At the filling station, the attendant came out to pump gas and usually cleaned the car windows and checked the oil. Calling on someone meant stopping by to visit (and usually was motivated by love in the case of the sheriff or Uncle Telamachus). Those kinds of things.

This story - "Nothing New Under the Sun (Hardly)" - required short summaries of two well-known other stories: Rip Van Winkle and The Pied Piper of Hamelin. When a mysterious stranger arrives in Centerburg, the townspeople are suspicious of his appearance and curious about the contraption hidden under a canvas on the back of the man's truck. His long beard gets wrapped around his steering wheel and dipped in his gravy. He whistles a strange tune and seems to attract the children. The sheriff and the librarian deduce that he is like Rip. Only when he is hired by the mayor to trap the town's mice with his musical mousetrap and is followed to the city limits by the children does the children's librarian think she has associated him with the wrong story. Would the children of Centerburg be lured away by the odd man? They are not. They devise a clever plan to save themselves. But the intertwined stories and the wonderfully detailed drawings make this yet another favorite story in the collection.