reading

Reading Season

/ Tessa Pagones / 5 Comments

Fall mornings around here are my most magical time. It’s still dark when I wake up, so I have time to start my day slowly, but I know I don’t yet have snow and ice to contend with when I do go outside. I may wake up early and read, as I did this morning, until it gets light enough to see, and then I take the dogs out. After I feed the horses is my time for wandering, with or without my camera (well, fine, my phone), to see what this day brings.

Fall is the most evocative season for me, but it’s hard to say exactly what it evokes. I grew up in a city, in a family that did not have very many traditions and did very little holiday-related decorating. The place where I grew up did have four seasons, but not the kind of dramatic seasons that include mountainsides flaming with fall foliage. Get me near the smell of some bright yellow gingko leaves on damp concrete, though, and I am right back in my childhood.

It’s also November, which means that technically fall is half over. We are having our first week of temperatures around freezing at night, though, and I guess cold nights mean fall to me far more than the date. Fall is a good time to curl up with a book or ten. Every season was a reading season in my childhood, but there must have been a time we started coming inside in the evenings instead of running around in the alley playing kickball or freeze tag with the other kids on our block. Maybe it corresponded to the beginning of school, or maybe it was the end of daylight savings, or maybe it was the start of colder weather. At this time and place in my life, fall means fewer outside chores to do and less light in the evening, and those two things together mean more time for books.

I’m reading Fahrenheit 451 right now, I think for the first time. I read a lot of Bradbury for pleasure in junior high and high school, but I don’t think I would have found this one pleasurable then. I also think I somehow missed having Bradbury as assigned reading in any class, which would have been a good way to get me to dislike him. I know my oldest sister had his story All Summer in a Day in one of her junior high English books, but reading her assigned reading was a very different thing from reading my own assigned reading. The way Bradbury puts words together, and the pictures he paints with them – that’s the same whether it’s Dandelion Wine (forever my favorite book of his), The Martian Chronicles, or Fahrenheit. For me, reading Bradbury is a journey. I open to a page and I am right there next to his characters, seeing and smelling and tasting and feeling what they see and smell and taste and feel. Early this morning, Montag and I were running from the Hound,  carried away by the river and fetching up on land somewhere out in the country, and I’ve been needing a nap ever since.

I’m not sure Dandelion Wine is technically a book for kids – it’s probably in that nebulous category of “young adult” fiction that I love: books that could just be classified as fiction but they are attractive to – but not specifically written for – teenage and advanced preteen readers. Like many of the kids’ books I love, there’s something of a seasonal arc to it – starting with the end of one school year, and ending with the first signs of fall at the end of summer. Gone Away Lake, Summer Pony, And Then There Were Five – I’m sure there are many others. There’s a natural freedom to adventure during those summer months. Children in books often get sent somewhere else so they aren’t too looked after – my mother used to say that children’s authors have to kill off the mothers long before the book starts or the kids would never get to have all the adventures. Sending them to live with an aunt or a grandfather is a slightly gentler approach.

Books like the Little House series often cover a whole year, with some of them – like Little House in the Big Woods, and Farmer Boy – celebrating the markers and rituals of each season. Maybe that’s what fall evokes for me – the rituals I lived through the written word. All the elements of butchering the pig in the Big Woods, the days getting shorter, the nights colder. The county fair in Farmer Boy, harvesting the crops, making apple cider.

I have surprising gaps in my memory of my actual childhood, but I think I remember every book I ever read. Some of them seem like I may have made them up, despite my vivid memory of the illustrations and even the format of the words on the page. I have been looking for years for something I remember as The Bunny Nutshell Library, a collection of tiny books in a box. The one I remember most clearly was about the first robin of spring, a young robin who gets so excited about being the first that he pushes the season and catches a cold. The doctor (a squirrel, maybe? or a badger?) comes to see him and says that his heart is going “boom pitty boom pitty boom boom boom” (written, incidentally, as a poem, and, I believe, in italics). I have a feeling, though I sincerely hope I’m wrong, that he prescribes chicken soup for the robin’s convalescence.

I hope I’m confusing that with Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup with Rice. The kind of thing I DO remember clearly from my own childhood is being very disappointed that the taste of chicken soup with rice was nothing like as magical as that book led me to expect. I remember my mother leaving me a lunch thermos on the dining room table (when even elementary school kids could walk home for lunch to an empty house, which now makes me feel like someone out of the Little House books – the previously undiscovered Little Townhouse in Washington DC) and it might contain chicken soup with rice, or it might contain a hot dog – you just never knew. In my memory, on the chicken soup with rice day, she left a note with the opening of the book (“In January/ it’s so nice/ while slipping/ on the sliding ice/ to sip hot chicken/ soup with rice”). I was in first grade at the time – my mother had just started work again after a 12 year hiatus for mothering young children – so I don’t at all trust my memory of the note, but knowing my mother, it’s likely I’m right.

One of the many things I don’t remember about my childhood is when I learned to read. I don’t remember not reading, and I don’t remember being read to. When my own kids were young, I discovered the joy of reading to them and hoped they would never outgrow wanting me to. Even books that drove me insane, like the Rosie and Tessa books my mother dredged up from somewhere because of the names. Tessa Snaps Snakes, and Rosie Sips Spiders. For me they were mainly a tutorial in the difference between American and British English, and possibly American and British ideas about what makes a good book. Our youngest, however, liked to hear them over and over – and over and over again. I was never so tempted to lose books, or to accidentally leave them out in the driving rain. It wasn’t the repetition – I never tired of Dr Seuss’ Sneetches and Other Stories. In fact, if my youngest child who is now 31 and lives more than halfway across the country were to call me right now and ask me to read that book to her, I would happily begin “Now the Star Bellied Sneetches had bellies with stars. But the Plain Bellied Sneetches had none upon thars” while I was still walking upstairs to get the book. I can’t ask my mother how she felt about Bread and Jam for Francis, a book I loved (and that my youngest loved equally) and that she must have read to me ad nauseum. I gather it made my sisters gnash their teeth the same way Rosie and Tessa made me gnash mine.

As much as I enjoyed sharing books I loved as a child with my own children, I even more loved discovering new books with them, though it did not always go smoothly. Rose and I took turns reading to the younger two at bedtime in their shared room (one of the few things that made sharing a room briefly tolerable). It was Rose’s turn to read when we were nearing the end of Sharon Creech’s wonderful Walk Two Moons, but she couldn’t keep reading because she was crying too hard. I sighed and said “Give me the book” and read for maybe two more pages before I, too, was unable to keep going. Our youngest, who was by then 8, took the book from me and finished reading it to all of us while Rose and I sat and wept.

These days as I walk in the fall mornings and look at whatever catches the light or my eye – different every day – I think about how to tackle my writing assignment for my latest class, or I try to remember all the lyrics to The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night while dodging fox poop on the frosty grass, or I think about how complex fall is. All seasons mark the beginning of one thing and the end of another, but fall is endier than most, even though it is my favorite. The gloom that descends in the fall has been a topic in our family for many years, and for many reasons. In Ruby Holler, another splendid Sharon Creech book we first read with the kids, the characters have recipes like accept-my-apology pie and anti-cranky crumpets and nightmare-cure ice cream and waffles for breakfast. We have long talked about creating a getting-over-sad-September soup, or a forgetting-past-falls stew.

This particular fall it’s just me here, and my now-November recipe isn’t food based. It’s walking, and looking, and taking pictures, and remembering, and also reading books both old and new. And sometimes listening to my own heart going boom pitty boom pitty boom boom boom.

Home Comforts

/ Tessa Pagones / 5 Comments

Fans and contestants of the Great British Bake Off seemed equally horrified by this week’s technical challenge, Sussex Pond Pudding, but I was delighted. I’ve never eaten it and there’s a good chance I never will, but I will always remember my introduction to it via the late, great, Laurie Colwin in her wonderful book Home Cooking.

Laurie includes Sussex Pond Pudding (as Suffolk Pond Pudding) in her chapter called Kitchen Horrors. It has very few ingredients – a suet pastry crust, a whole lemon, sugar, and butter. She uses this particular recipe to show that a kitchen horror can be in the eye of the beholder. She was thrilled with it – she described the interior as “lemon-scented buttery toffee,” but the friends she was visiting for dinner were less thrilled. Her host said “This tastes like lemon-flavored bacon fat,” while her hostess said “I’m sure it tastes wonderful. I mean, in England.” Judging from the Bake Off constestants and viewers, I’m not sure the English would agree.

My mother introduced me to Laurie Colwin, first with Home Cooking and later with her novels and short stories, as she introduced me to so many authors and books. Reading was our main family activity all through my childhood, and my mother gave us books for just about every gift-giving occasion. When we were kids, she always seemed to know the kind of books we would each like. She would never have given me Ballet Shoes, or given Darcy All Creatures Great and Small, but we had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on two walls in the living room of the house we grew up in, and plenty of books if we wanted to branch out of our regular interests.

We moved to a different house when I was sixteen and both my sisters had gone off to college. It was a house my father had owned and rented out for many years: a townhouse converted into seven efficiency apartments, so it was me and my parents and two cats rattling around on four floors with seven kitchens and seven bathrooms. The apartment we used as the living room also had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves – as did the apartment my parents moved to after that, as does the house Rose and I live in now, come to think of it. Even after having to dispose of dozens of boxes of books after my father’s death, I am still horrified when I hear people suggest downsizing their book collections.

At some point my mother’s book gifts changed from books she thought I would like in a general way to her using books like I used mix tapes. Books that told me she saw something about me that I hadn’t found the words to tell her. Books that told me things about her that she didn’t have the words to say. Books that told me she understood me, or that helped me understand her. I can only remember one time where the message went completely awry – a book about a woman whose son came out to her, and her journey from all the very wrong things she said at first to becoming an activist. It was hard for me to hear past the son’s pain to realize that she was probably trying to tell me the mother’s side of the story. It wouldn’t be till my own child came out to me that I realized all the completely wrong things to say come out of fear for your child, and out of wanting your child’s life to be easier.

The last two years I lived in my parents’ house, my senior year in high school and the year I took off before college, I wasn’t home very much. When I came home late in the evening, usually my father was in the living room, watching TV, reading, listening to music, falling asleep in his chair, or once, memorably, doing a midnight dance with an invisible partner, clad in his ratty old brown terry bathrobe, as light on his feet as Gene Kelly. My mother was usually in bed reading, and as I climbed up to the apartment on the top floor that served as my bedroom, I would look in to say goodnight to each of them.

Sometimes I would sit on the edge of the bed and my mother would read to me from whatever book she was reading at the time. I still hear whole chapters from Sue Hubbell’s A Country Year in my mother’s voice. I think it was a book that really touched something in her, and it would become the same for me a few years later when I left college feeling like the wheels were coming off my mind. Two books from my mother, A Country Year and Mary Morris’ Nothing to Declare, helped me put the puzzle pieces back together in something resembling order.

It was also in this post-college time that my mother began giving me cookbooks. Some classics from her own kitchen: The Joy of Cooking, Fannie Farmer, The Silver Palate. Some funny and useful: The I Hate to Cook Book, good for the days I just didn’t feel like it but still needed to eat. And some that are wonderful books for reading about food, and that also contain some good (and some odd) recipes: Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking and John Thorne’s Simple Things.

I have always both cooked and read for comfort. I don’t really understand people who just read a book once, and I have many books that I have read the covers off of. Home Cooking and Simple Things have stood up to my many readings, though both are a bit food-splattered from being too close to the mixing bowl while I made something from their pages. I will always draw comfort from rereading certain favorite childhood books – A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, Red Sky at Morning, Dandelion Wine. But nothing will ever quite soothe me like reading Laurie Colwin’s words about the good (curried broccoli soup, lemon rice pudding), the bad (starry gazy pie made with squid, scrambled eggs with mace), and the weird (Sussex pond pudding), hearing my mother’s voice repeating the words, with the soft sounds of music and my father’s dancing feet drifting up from the floor below.