~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I can remember reading the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam behind the couch in the living room when I was in grade school. I’m sure I missed a lot in the big scheme of things with this poetry, although the poems were easy reading– “a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou, underneath the bough. . . .” is how I remember one of them, but as I look it up I see it reads like this:
“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread–and Thou
I liked the fragile onionskin sheets of the paperback book and the lovely drawing of the pretty woman lounging under the tree; she looked like my worshipped babysitter Virginia Tronchetti, blonde teenager from across the street.
I then fell in love with Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House series – “ . . . in the Big Woods,” “ . . . on the Prairie.” I knew then I had been born in the wrong era. I lived on the prairie, but it wasn’t exactly like the prairie I was meant to live on, doing pioneer girl farm chores that were much more interesting than my chores of setting the table and washing the dishes. I wanted to be in on the birthing of a calf.
I moved on to Black Beauty, crying over his ill treatment again and again. I galloped through Jefferson like the wind, into alleys, across strangers’ backyards, down the ravine behind Chatauqua Park. I blamed my parents for our living in town where I couldn’t have a horse (their reason for my not having one) and continued thinking I was living in the wrong age. When I got my first bike, I named it “Black Beauty.”
Then I discovered My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead and The Green Grass of Wyoming, horse books by Mary O’Hara that took place in the 1930s, not an impossibly ancient era to my early 1950s. But, Flicka’s family lived in Wyoming, which might as well have been the moon, and they owned a ranch, with streams and mountains as well as herds of wild horses. I lived far from that scene in more ways than literal distance.
I reread the series this winter and was as captivated by the tales as I was half a century ago. For four days I lived again on the Remount Ranch between Laramie and Cheyenne, riding the green grass hills, exploring on horseback the pine ridges of the Laramie Mountains. The experiment of re-reading these books was a good one. O’Hara wrote for adults, not for children, although her trilogy became famous as children’s literature because the main character is a young boy. The depth and wisdom in the books made them so worthy of a return visit as an adult.
My favorites of all my childhood, however, were the Betsy books by Maud Hart Lovelace. There were 10 of them, starting with Betsy-Tacy and moving on to Betsy, Tacy and
Tib as little girls in Minnesota at the turn of the last century. As I recall them, the books progress to Betsy in grade school, high school, touring Europe before World War Two and coming home to marry Joe, her high school sweetheart. I read the Betsy books over and over and therefore knew her quite well, wishing all the time that I was Betsy pulling taffy at parties and singing “Peg O’ My Heart” around the piano with my friends. I reread the Betsy books a few years ago and still like her, although these are indeed books for young girls, not for adults. Betsy fans abound – The Betsy-Tacy Society has preserved the houses of the girls, whose characters are built on the author and her best friend and their girlhood homes in Mankato, Minnesota. I probably won’t visit.
But revisiting the books of my youth – these and others, like the Bobbsey Twins, The Five Little Peppers, Little Women – these kinds of visits soothe the soul.
