For me, it was Dorothea Warren Fox's Miss Twiggley's Tree. The story was about a southern town where the village eccentric chose to live away from people in a tree house with cats, dogs, and even bears. The locals made fun of her oddities, until it floods after a massive hurricane. Most brutal to her was the Mayor's wife who was all uppity-uppity about the nuisance and weirdness that was Miss Twiggley's Tree. Alas, as people were climbing on their roofs, and floating along flooded waters, it was Miss Twiggley, and her tree, that offered them safety, shelter, and refuge. All the locals had to bite their tongues as Miss Twiggley offered them tea and biscuits in her tree house, as they dined with the animals.
I loved this book and it was at my grandmother's summer camp where I read it. When I became a teacher, and the internet became a thing, I went on a rampage of finding copies of the book to give to my sisters at the holidays. I wanted them to have the book for their children, as the book made such an impact on my sisters and me.
I kept thinking about this at the Pequot Library as I looked at readers, primers, pamphlets, and beginning books (many of them in German, as that was an influence of New England). I will be helping an exhibit go up in February and look forward to being on a panel that talks about the history of children's literature, which sparked me to thinking about the Textual Lineage (I THANK MY HERO, DR. ALFRED TATUM for that phrase) and the books my own students name as influential to their literate lives.
For this reason, I'm going indoors and into memory today to wonder, "What books offer an early, environmental aesthetic?" Books matter. Stories matter more. Representation matters most. I'm curious what others have to say about the literature they remember from their childhood.
That's where my hoola hoop landed this morning. On a book triggered by a visit to a library in anticipation of an exhibit. I'm hoping to hear from a few of you and to learn.