Blog

One of my goals is to write a children's book about death. I know, bad idea, right? But I've worked with refugees and displaced persons. I've seen children at their first funeral. I tend to write about things that are overlooked. It seems to me that very few books deal with the sadness of permanent loss.

Here are some things I've heard kids ask or say. Each speaker was less than eight years old:

Why are we putting her in the ground? Heaven is up.

I'm sick and tired of Trey being dead.

Can't we...

Lellooooo..... Lelloooo....

A tiny friend is learning her words. She giggles, squirms, hides her eyes behind small pudgy hands while she gathers the courage to speak. And then - after a sneak peek at the audience - tries out her latest achievement. In a breathy, surprisingly deep voice, she tries to say hello.

Lelloooo....

It's clear she's both proud and nervous. She's feeling accomplished - look at all this attention! Yet she wonders - did I get the words right?

I wish I could tell her, we have...

There is an heirloom apple tree on public land near my house. It must be 75 years old. It probably sprang up from a discarded seed, and left alone, simply grew. Now, twisted large branches droop thirty or more feet from crown to dirt. Small, lumpy, dull green apples hang from the tree. Many more lie in heaps around the base.

Most of the apples have worm holes, or brown spots, or spider webs embedded by rain into little greyish lumps around the stems. Compared to the apples in the store, which...

Splash! Skid! Sprinkle! Shriek! The neighborhood toddler party was a festival of onomatopoeia.

Also a reminder that one-word sentences can convey as much emotion as rhythmic or lyrical passages. Little ones can "fill in the blanks". Who knows if I'll write a book about a backyard splash party - but I'll remember the sounds of joy.

I had a change of perspective - literally - after discovering foxglove plants that were six to seven feet tall. I felt so little - which is how my (potential) readers must feel all the time. It was different than hiking among, say, redwood trees. I expect them to be huge. Flowers? Quite a surprise.

Note to self: to tell stories for children, remember to sit down. View the world from three feet above the earth. The scale is so different.

Hiking in a second-growth forest in British Columbia today, I ran across an abandoned piece of equipment called a Mechanical Donkey. This device, about the size of a compact car, was used to winch fallen trees up or down the very steep slopes upon which they had grown. Now rusted, with a frayed cable wrapped around the spool, this device was critical to the livelihoods of the first European settlers in my remote location.

A few hundred yards below me, there remains a small settlement of First...

Beneath the dock the seaweeds sway

In marching lines four times each day

Dark purple, green, and red display

Like banners on parade.

First north to south the water flows

Delights your dangling dock-based toes

From marsh to ocean, out it goes.

Slack tide: the pennants fade.

Now urchins, sea stars, otters meet

Among the silky leaves to eat

Delicious eel grass tasty treat

Before the currents turn.

And as the tide from far-off sea

returns, know that my love will be

as big and deep and wide and free

for you,...