Ice is nice

Dear Annie,

There's a chill in the air here: the first frost is predicted for tonight.  And who better to get us thinking about winter than the Moomintrolls?   I'm startled that they've never made an appearance in Annie and Aunt.  Another day I'll write more about their odd and delightful personalities, their chapter books, comic books, cartoons, and intense following around the world, especially in Russia and Japan.  Tove Jansson, a Swedish author living in Finland, created them in 1945, and kept cranking out books until the '70s.  They focus on a family of, well, Moomintrolls and a variety of their friends.  It all feels slightly Winnie-the-Pooh -ish, in a Finnish sort of way.

Today I'm sticking with Moomin's Winter Follies, a comic book first published in 1955. Moomintroll, the son and main character in the Moomin family, wakes to discover "Glass all over our pond." It doesn't stop him from attempting his morning swim:

(Moominmama is never without her purse; Moominpapa's top hat is his identifying object. )

The attempt at hibernating lasts only a few pages: when they leave the house, they discover snow everywhere and the energetic newcomer Mr. Brisk organizing Winter Games.  Skating, skiing, snowball fights -- the charmingly zaftig Moomins aren't the competitive sports types.  Two female characters develop crushes on the oblivious Mr. Brisk, much to Moomintroll's dismay.  All works out in the end, of course.

Then there's the lovely small
Twelve Kinds of Ice by Ellen Bryan Obed, with illustrations by Barbara McClintock.  Obed remembers the many kinds of ice she and her siblings observed over the course of Maine winters.  First Ice "came on the sheep pails in the barn -- a skim of ice so thin that it broke when we touched it."  The fourth kind of ice, Field Ice, is frozen puddles in the fields big enough for the first skating of the season. 

The family devotes a 100-by-50 foot space to an outdoor rink, clearing weeds and stubble and putting up framing boards.

When the snow came, we began making garden ice.  The first step was snow packing.  Everyone worked on this -- Dad and Mom, my brothers, my sister and I.  We stamped and packed the snow hard with our boots and shovels.  We packed it with our skis.  We packed it with the toboggan, on which one or two of us sat to be pulled back and forth across the hardening surface.
   Suddenly, Dad would say, "Time to get the hose!"

The rink becomes a neighborhood center, with hockey games and figure skaters.  In February there's  an ice show, attended by fans from near and far.

The show is the climax of the season, and the thaw isn't far behind.  There's Last Ice, and then -- until the late fall -- Dream Ice:

This ice came in our sleep.  We never knew when it would come, but when it did, we could skate anywhere we wanted -- down roads, in and out of yards, and over the tops of trees.  We could do any jump we pleased without practicing.  Double axels over houses and splits over telephone wires.  We did spins on chimney tops and spirals down slanting roofs.  We lifted off our skates into the sky to land on the back edges of clouds.

I hope all this ice has been a little respite from the news.  Here's hoping for a good day tomorrow.

Love,

Deborah

Ah, gay Paris!

Dear Aunt Debbie,

You sent us Dodsworth in New York a little while ago, and it's a favorite here.  The duck is just so odd, and Dodsworth himself so quirky, that it's a really pleasing read.  There are of course moments that make no geographic sense if you know New York City (Dodsworth takes a taxi following a bus the duck is riding from the Upper East Side to Coney Island: a) No such bus.  b) Hell of an expensive taxi ride.), but that's a minor complaint in a fun book.  We took Dodsworth in Paris out of the library a little while ago, and it wasn't as big a hit, but still enjoyable.  We like to read the duck with a broad nasal accent.

Now you've got me thinking about Paris.  So many great children's books about the city, starting of course with the unimpeachable Madeline, by Ludwig Bemelmans.  My mom (your older sister), says that Madeline was the first book she pretended to have learned to read: she knew the whole thing by heart, including when to turn the pages, and "read" it aloud to Grandma and Grandpa at a pretty young age.  I can probably do the whole book from memory myself at this point, after reading it over and over to Eleanor:"In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines/Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines."  At about age 3 and a little earlier, it was one of Eleanor's most-requested books, and her favorite page was the one where Madeline "pooh-pooh"s the tiger in the zoo.  Eleanor would stop me every time: "The other girls are all scared of the tiger, but not Madeline!"  A great role model.

Paris isn't the focus of the text, of course: it's Madeline's appendicitis and the other girls' jealousy over her hospital visit and fabulous scar.  But the drawings are full of Parisian locations and local color, and an end-note identifies every location the girls walk through.  Reading it as an adult, there are moments that seem like they might be stressful for children: where are the girls' parents, and why are they living with a nun?  Will Madeline be okay?  I don't remember any sense of stress from it as a child, however -- on the contrary, Miss Clavel's final benediction reads to me even now as a moment of peace and grace: "'Good night little girls, thank the lord you are well.  And now go to sleep,' said Miss Clavel."


Another book with Paris as its backdrop and a high-spirited girl as its heroine is Mirette on the High Wire, by Emily Arnold McCully.  I'd never heard of this one until you sent it to Eleanor, but what a lovely book it is!  Mirette lives and works in her mother's boarding house.  She becomes fascinated with one of the boarders there, a quiet man who turns out to be the great Bellini, a high-wire walker who performed extraordinary feats before losing his confidence on the wire.  Mirette sees him practicing on the clothesline outside and asks him to teach her; he refuses, saying essentially that he doesn't want to doom her to his career.  But she's been bitten by the bug, and practices on her own for weeks until she can walk the clothesline on her own.  It's a redemption story: Bellini teaches Mirette, and in doing so regains his own confidence.  Mirette is strongly the main character, and the relationship between the two is kind and focused.  One of the things I like about the book is the emphasis it puts on practice, on really wanting something and working hard to get it, and on the truth that even when you become very good at something, you can have setbacks.  There are two sequels: Mirette and Bellini Cross Niagara Falls and Starring Mirette and Bellini, the first of which we've read.  Not as good as the original (largely, to my mind, because the starring role goes to a boy named Jakob instead of to Mirette), but still an interesting read.

Finally, I want to mention Barbara McClintock's Adele & Simon.  Here we are again in early 20th century Paris, following the responsible Adele and her absent-minded little brother, Simon, as they wend their way home from school through the city, stopping an improbable number of times. Simon starts with a number of possessions; at each stop, he loses something, and the joy of the book is to search the extremely detailed double page spread drawings to find the thing he's lost.  The first time through, there were several items it took me a while to find, and Eleanor had to do some serious searching.  Here's another take on it from Storied Cities, a lovely blog our friend Rachel (of Even in Australia) mentioned recently.

And now go to sleep, said Miss Clavel.

Love, Annie