Picture Book Monday: Ox-Cart Man
Jan. 4th, 2016 07:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI went to the library to mend picture books today, and... they had no picture books for us to mend! They've been so busy with holiday things that no one has been sorting out the injured books. So instead we mended adult books, which is of course a gallant and noble pursuit, but adult books are really much too long to read during the process of mending.
At home I've been culling our picture book collection, which has been long overdue for some sorting. I donated quite a lot of books to the library - our entire (rather hefty) Berenstain Bears collection, for one - but of course we still have quite a few, and I found a long-misplaced Barbara Cooney book into the bargain: Ox-Cart Man.
It's one of those books that follows the rhythm of the year, which I always found hopelessly lulling as a child. (I also loved The Year at Maple Hill Farm.) Every year in the fall, the Ox-Cart Man (he never does get a name) drives his ox-cart to market, with all the goods that his family has made during the year: a bag of wool he sheared from the sheep in April;
and a shawl his wife wove on a loom from yarn spun at the spinning wheel from sheep sheared in April;
and five pairs of mittens his daughter knit from yarn spun at the spinning wheel from sheep sheared in April.
As well as candles they made and flax they grew and shingles he split himself, and birch brooms that his son carved with a borrowed kitchen knife.
(This is a very "national foundation myth of the self-sufficient pioneer family during the age of homespun" book.)
And he goes to the market and sells the wool and the shawl and the mittens, candles and flax, shingles and brooms, and brings home a cooking pot and an embroidery needle and a carving knife, and the cycle begins anew.
It's really just a succession of lists of objects, but its terrifically soothing: like sinking into a warm bath. Or perhaps settling down by a warm fire on a chill winter's night would be a more fittingly atmospheric description.
At home I've been culling our picture book collection, which has been long overdue for some sorting. I donated quite a lot of books to the library - our entire (rather hefty) Berenstain Bears collection, for one - but of course we still have quite a few, and I found a long-misplaced Barbara Cooney book into the bargain: Ox-Cart Man.
It's one of those books that follows the rhythm of the year, which I always found hopelessly lulling as a child. (I also loved The Year at Maple Hill Farm.) Every year in the fall, the Ox-Cart Man (he never does get a name) drives his ox-cart to market, with all the goods that his family has made during the year: a bag of wool he sheared from the sheep in April;
and a shawl his wife wove on a loom from yarn spun at the spinning wheel from sheep sheared in April;
and five pairs of mittens his daughter knit from yarn spun at the spinning wheel from sheep sheared in April.
As well as candles they made and flax they grew and shingles he split himself, and birch brooms that his son carved with a borrowed kitchen knife.
(This is a very "national foundation myth of the self-sufficient pioneer family during the age of homespun" book.)
And he goes to the market and sells the wool and the shawl and the mittens, candles and flax, shingles and brooms, and brings home a cooking pot and an embroidery needle and a carving knife, and the cycle begins anew.
It's really just a succession of lists of objects, but its terrifically soothing: like sinking into a warm bath. Or perhaps settling down by a warm fire on a chill winter's night would be a more fittingly atmospheric description.
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Date: 2016-01-05 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-05 02:27 pm (UTC)I read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's The Age of Homespun a few years ago, which talks a lot about the foundation myth of the pioneer family, and I suspect this book is the reason it gave me such a thrill of recognition. It pretty much distills out that myth into its purest form.