100 Books, #31: Roxaboxen

asakiyume sent me a beautiful card with a drawing of a squirrel in a strange little room in a tree, which reminded me so much of Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge that I ransacked our old picture book shelves looking for my favorite Brambly Hedge book, The Secret Staircase. Alas, it was nowhere to be found!

But while I was looking for it I found a number of other childhood favorites. Emily Arnold McCully’s Mirette on the High Wire, which I got just a little too late for it to work its way into my DNA - I was too old to demand it read to me hundreds of times - but love nonetheless for tightrope walking and Mirette and France. Tasha Tudor’s Corgiville Fair, which means I still find corgis automatically interesting.

And most of all, Roxaboxen, written by Alice McLerran and illustrated by Barbara Cooney. I was not, in my picture book years, aware of such things as favorite authors or illustrators, but if I was, Barbara Cooney would have headed my list. I’ve already posted about Miss Rumphius, who vows to travel to far away places, live by the sea, and make the world more beautiful, and Hattie and the Wild Waves, who grows up to become an artist.

Creation - making pictures, making the world more beautiful - is central to Cooney’s books, and central as well to Roxaboxen. But Roxaboxen is not about pictures or flowers or things you can hold in your hand, but a group of friends who create an imaginary town: Roxaboxen, which grows out of the greasewood and thorny ocotillo of a desert across the road.

The desert is mostly full of broken crates and bits of white stone, and the kids gather up this seeming junk and make their imaginary town out of it: stones lining the streets, crates for bits of furniture. Frances branches out into desert glass, old broken bottles that become, in her mind, “amber, amethyst, and sea green: a house of jewels.”

Eventually, of course, they all grow up and go away and leave Roxaboxen behind to slowly melt back into the desert. But that’s not the end of things: “Because none of them ever forgot Roxaboxen. Not one of them ever forgot.” The echoes of stories in life - this is one of my favorite things.

One of the Roxaboxenites told the story to her daughter, Alice McClerran; and McClerran wrote Roxaboxen; and the hill in Yuma where Roxaboxen was, is now preserved forever by the Friends of Roxaboxen.