Finding solace (and tears) in my favorite childhood books
When I first learned how to read I felt as if I’d been given a key — one that could open any sort of door. I adored the picture books in my house, and regularly took them to bed with me, sleeping amid stacks of books and piles of stuffed animals. I was also a very competitive child, and soon after mastering books with many pictures and few words, I decided to test myself on the books in which words outnumbered illustrations.
One of the first really long books I read was Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows,” an old unabridged hardcover as big as the books my parents read. The prose was, for a young American girl, very British and fairly intimidating. I’m certain I missed many references and misunderstood loads of words.
Still, the friendship between softspoken Mole and ebullient Rat thrilled me, and I remember wishing I too could spend time just “messing about in boats” with a friend, rather than attending grade school and enduring life at home, sandwiched between brothers, confused by the demands of the adult world. Although I was an optimist like Rat and wanted to share his daring, I often feared that I was as befuddled, worried, and timid as Mole, which made me love him even more.
In the chapter titled “Dulce Domum,” after a Victorian-era boys’ boarding-school song, Rat and Mole are returning from a night spent at Badger’s extremely cozy den in the Wild Woods. They walk through a village of people — “all safe indoors by this time, sitting round the fire; men, women, and children, dogs and cats and all,” Rat remarks — a hint of things to come, as soon Mole smells his own long-abandoned underground home. He trudges behind Rat, who is hurrying to beat the coming snowstorm, until nostalgia overcomes him and Mole weeps for the “shabby, dingy, little place” that was “my own little home — and I was fond of it.”
Mole’s breakdown broke me then and it still makes me cry. But what happens next is magical. After Rat’s perfect apology (“What a pig I have been!”), the pair find Mole’s home, make a warm fire and mulled ale, and welcome a group of young field mice singing carols. As he falls asleep, Mole thinks how he loves his new life above ground but still needs “this place which was all his own.”
I was a crybaby as a child and I guess I still am. I can feel homesick even while at home, and the holidays only make things worse. But I can count on Rat and Mole to remind me that the heart, no matter how weary or broken, can be repaired, at least a bit, with friendship, food, and song — and that it’s OK to cry along the way.