Are there children on your shopping list for presents during this December’s holiday season? Two classic books, both set in Penobscot Bay and written by summer residents who happened to be prolific and successful authors, are newly pertinent and deserving of your consideration. Both books were written during times of international strife and dissonance. They seem to suggest the importance of a healthier, more life-affirming focus than one built on difference and destruction. They recognize our interdependency in the world as positive and desirable, and value peace rather than discord.
In The Little Island, Margaret Wise Brown (using her pseudonym Golden MacDonald) portrays a place initially pictured as solitary. Even though the real island she based this on is not far from her home, “Only House” on Vinalhaven, here it appears to be many miles from anything else. Much of the year, aspects of nature — weather, vegetation, creatures and the fog that “came in from the sea and hid the little Island in a soft wet shadow” — are the only inhabitants or visitors there. But with the advent of summer, a sailboat arrives, bearing people and a kitten. The kitten remarks on how small the island is, and the island responds that the kitten is too. The kitten counters: “But I am part of this big world. My feet are on it.” The island says the same is true for it. To make sense of that, the kitten catches a fish and asks, “How is an island part of the land?” The answer, according to the fish, can only be revealed if the kitten swims with him to the “dark secret places of the sea.” The kitten replies it can’t swim, so the fish suggests the kitten will “have to take it on faith. To believe what I tell you about what you don’t know.” The fish then explains that “all land is one land under the sea.” Content with that knowledge, the kitten happily departs.
Brown concluded her book with, “And it was good to be a little Island. A part of the world and a world of its own all surrounded by the bright blue sea.” It seems that a sense of contentment is based on what the island knew, what the fish told the kitten: “All land is one land under the sea.” Written in 1947, after the end of World War Two, it is easy to imagine Brown is suggesting a way to live in peace. We need to realize how interrelated we are; “one land,” as it were.
Time of Wonder by Robert McCloskey, written in 1957, also begins with a picture of islands. These are ones near Buck’s Harbor. The author’s real-life daughters, Jane and Sally, are portrayed over a summer’s stay, experiencing things like sudden rain (“Now you hear a million splashes…”), a foggy morning (“you feel as though you were standing alone on the edge of nowhere”) and a long, warm evening (“the stars are gazing down, their reflections gazing up”). When a hurricane approaches, the otherwise beneficent natural world turns threatening (“You feel the light crisp feeling go out of the air and a heavy stillness take its place.”) Supplies are laid in, boats are beached, windows covered, wood and water stocked. When the fury of high winds hits, waves soar and trees crash in a frenzy. The family huddles together, telling stories and singing songs. Late at night, the wind abates, and “whispers a lullaby in the spruce branches as you fall asleep in the bright moonlight.”
Written during the Cold War, McCloskey’s book seems to suggest some things in the world will be scary and destructive, feeling beyond one’s control. But beyond preparing as best you can (one can certainly draw a parallel between hunkering down inside during a storm and the government promotion of family fallout shelters in the fifties), strength and hope can be found in the caring support of relationships.
Thanks to television, contemporary events causing destruction and death — like the attacks of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the war in the Middle East — are familiar to our kids. McCloskey’s and Brown’s books could be seen as Pollyanna-ish, seeming to suggest we should just try to live a healthy and happy life ourselves and hope the rest of the world follows suit. But I believe these authors are suggesting that peace and goodwill starts within each of us, and joins with others. The world could become a better place. I think both McCloskey and Brown would agree that lessons of life learned in childhood should include recognizing the fragile dependency creatures and environments share. Those relationships should be respected, valued. In the holiday season that celebrates peace and goodwill to all, these stories could be one eloquent way to teach our children just that.
Tina Cohen has been a school librarian and counsels children. These books are two of her favorites.