Children of Long Ago: Poems

Poems reflecting simpler days, with grandmothers who read aloud and children who walk barefoot on damp earth and pick blackberries for their paper dolls to eat.

Gilchrist's sweeping pastel illustrations summon readers and draw them into Little's affecting, nostalgic text about children in the past, who "ate picnics under spreading trees,/ Played hopscotch on the cool dirt yards, / Picked juicy grapes from broad grapevines,/ Pulled beets and potatoes from the ground,/ Those children of long ago." These statuesque children are every shade of brown, from cinnamon in the sunlight to a lustrous cocoa that glows in the light of oil-filled lamps; a rural setting in the early 1900s is the backdrop for these transcendent and evocative images. A girl tells her grandmother, "Your eyeglasses are pretty and thin and clear / With long gold arms that hug your ears." Another girl addresses "Mr. Empty Woodbox": "How can Mama make a meal/ When there's no wood for fire?" The answer is her own hard workshe runs off to gather wood. By turns playful and wistful, both text and pictures recreate a warm mood of American domesticity that readers will linger over. All ages.
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