So time passed on. I had a daughter of my own. I don't know that I ever read her the whole book. I treated it like a book shelf full of story books. Some stories we read over and over, others we dipped into just once.
Our favorite way to read it was on the front porch on a warm summer evening, with the cicada chorus playing in the background. Sometimes she sat in my skirt, using it to swing between my knees.
But we also read it in the winter, in Decembers, curled up on her bed.
When the local library had an exhibit of "Literary Art" I made a Map of the Rootabaga Country.
And now I have deconstructed the map into this advent calendar, in which anything can happen.
“When the moon has a green rim with red meat inside and black seeds on the red meat, then in the Rootabaga Country they call it a Watermelon Moon and look for anything to happen.”
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Rootabaga Stories
By Carl Sandburg
Illustrations and Decorations by
Maud and Miska Petersham
1922
Once, when I was young and restless, I bought a magic train ticket that let me go anywhere I wanted for a whole month.
I started in San Francisco, where my Hawaiian cousin John Reppun, a student at Berkeley, gave me my first copy of the Rootabaga Stories.
I read the book on the train. It begins as I was beginning, with a magic train ticket. I read myself to sleep, curled up on a train seat. I slept with the book under my head. It crept into my being.
I fell in love with the prose and the illustrations. (I'm certainly not trying to best the Petershams, just creating my own cover of their beautiful song.)
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