Wise Margaret Brown

Not so long ago, I read a column by Libby Gruner about books for babies. She wrote eloquently about picking books as a gift for a friend's new baby, and about the deeply ingrained memories that each fondled book recalls. When you've read something over and over to your own child, the words sear themselves into your brain, while your hands recall the very shape and heft and texture of the book itself.

At the grand old age of four and two-thirds, Miss M. is largely past the board book stage, though a few creep out from time to time. Her bookshelves were overflowing and it was time for a culling, time to make room for new books. For lack of a better way to begin, I took out all the baby board books and put them aside. But while I was doing it, I had to make a separate pile for the Margaret Wise Brown books were talking to me.

We've got six. Some are new copies, given to Miss M. over the past few years. A couple are "Little Golden Book" editions from my childhood. Another came from eBay. I could read them all, each and every night.

There's a calm poetry to her books, with idiosyncratic repetition and alliteration amid the prose. Phrases like "wild green world" and "purple as violets / purple as plums / purple as shadows on late afternoons" and "the sun went down beyond the river / the sky grew wild and red" and "and in all that brown, the sun went down" get repeated or paralleled. The words demand a soothing tone of voice, a slow cadence, just right for the wind-down before bed, "in the big red barn / in the dark night sky".

I can't bear to put them away. It would be too sharp a sign that my baby's no longer a baby.