Once upon a time, my family used to travel up to Mt. Prospect, IL on Christmas Day to celebrate the holiday with my Great Aunt Rosie, Great Uncle Bob, and their daughters, Carmen and Kathy.  As we feasted on a Honeybaked ham, scalloped potatoes, Aunt Rosie’s famous layered Jello dessert, and her VERY merry spiked punch, she charmed everyone around her with her glorious smile, sparkling blue eyes, accepting attitude, and gift for making you feel important as she listened carefully and thoughtfully to everything you said.

Both Uncle Bob and Aunt Rosie loved books.  Uncle Bob was an English teacher and Aunt Rosie was an elementary school teacher, so they both understood the value of books.  For Christmas, Aunt Rosie always gave me a book.  But not just any book.  A children’s picture book.  I don’t know how she knew, even way back when I was in high school, that one day children’s books would be so important to me, but I’ve learned that you can’t question the wisdom of a perceptive soul.  For years, I kept those books with their personal Christmas inscriptions on my bookshelves amongst the Faulkner novels, Rand tombs, and Dickens masterpieces…until Luke was born.  Then I went back to them with a more discerning eye for quality, and I found them to be amazing. The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery by Graeme Base, The Three Questions [Based on a story by Leo Tolstoy] by Jon Muth, and Stranger in the Woods: A Photographic Fantasy (Nature) by Carl Sams and Jean Stoick are just a few of the books she gave me.

Uncle Bob passed away a few years ago, and Aunt Rosie is now in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s.  When I saw her last Christmas, she recognized us, but she couldn’t remember our names.  She’s in an assisted living home in Arizona, and I don’t know if I will ever see her again.  But I can’t forget the books and the kindness that she showered on my family and me.  So this year, I sent her books.  Children’s picture books.

The first is called Grandpa Green by Lane Smith.  A gorgeously and cleverly illustrated Caldecott Honor Book, it’s told by an old man’s great grandson, and the reader follows the boy through an elaborately shaped topiary garden where Grandpa Green has carved each bush to represent an episode from his life.  Throughout the book, the little boy collects random things that his grandpa has forgotten: glasses, a hat, gloves, a trowel.  At the end, the boy recognizes that even though Grandpa Green is old and sometimes forgets things, the garden will always remember the important things for him.  The metaphor is just too strong to ignore.  I am the garden for Aunt Rosie.  We all are–her daughters, my family, her many friends.  Even though she can no longer remember us, we are a repository for all of the wonderful parts of her that she shared with us through the years.  She shaped us, and what’s more, her influence is now going beyond just one generation, for I am reading the books she gave me with my own children.

The second book that I sent to Aunt Rosie is one that I mentioned in my last post: Journey by Aaron Becker.  It’s the exact type of book that Aunt Rosie would have given to me–beautifully illustrated with a timeless storyline that a reader will never tire of revisiting again and again.  In it, a young girl is bored and no one in her family has time to play with her.  She discovers a piece of red chalk in her room, though, and draws a door on her wall.  She steps through the door and into a magical land where she goes on a grand adventure of imagination.  It’s a wonderful book.  I hope Aunt Rosie loves it as much as Luke and I do.

So, even though Alzheimer’s has stolen away Aunt Rosie’s memory, it does not mean that nothing of her remains.  Her appreciation and instinct for great children’s picture books will live on through me and my children.

Love you, Aunt Rosie!

–Erin, Christmas 2014