I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;

I'll only stop to rake the leaves away

And wait to watch the water clear, I may:

I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf

That's standing by the mother. It's so young,

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

 

Robert Frost

When my children were young, we read and read and read.  Their reading began vicariously as I always held a book while nursing, relieved to be past the demands of graduate school and teaching, grateful to read whatever I might choose.  (I remember a fellow English major saying, “I’m not in college any longer.  I don’t have to like The Fairie Queene.”  And I thought, Yes.  YES!)

 As soon as I could prop a baby in my lap, though, I found books we could share.

 Once, Peter, my first, and I were both filled to the brim with picture books, we moved on to fairy tales and folk tales, to the Narnia series, then to The Hobbit, and finally to the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, reading mostly, but not exclusively, at bedtime.  Moving through all those books in reading-time-sized chunks took years, and after I had read the last word of the Tolkien series, Peter started at the beginning and read them all again to himself.  Multiple times.

 (As an adult, he sported a tattoo of Gandolph on one bicep, a use of story his mother never would have dreamed.  But then Peter was always one to find uses for the world that were different than I knew how to dream.)

 With my second, Beth-Alison, the books I remember best are the now problematic Laura Ingalls Wilder series.  Laura delighted my daughter by continually getting into trouble.  Not big trouble but enough to provide vicarious delight for my own very good little girl.  Once Laura grew up enough to behave herself in a proper Victorian way, Beth-Alison lost interest entirely. 

 There were foster children, too, and thus more stories to read.  I’ve never forgotten holding Michelle, a beautiful Black toddler, on my lap, looking past her fluff of soft, dark hair to the pages of the same picture books I had shared with the children born to me.  What I remember most clearly was the moment I noticed for the first time that not a single child on those pages looked anything like the one I held. I didn’t know then what to make of such an omission.  I could only register it with the first stirrings of awareness and of pain for the little one I had come to love so deeply.

 In the final years of my bedtime reading with Beth-Alison, we turned to poetry.  And every night, every single night, at her request, we ended with Robert Frost’s “The Pasture.” 

Recently, I encountered “The Pasture” again.  I fell into the familiar rhythms, into the small, satisfying story, and found myself once more inhabiting that long-ago time.  The quiet room, the beloved child tucked safely into bed, the moment of just-us in a busy household, the comforting refrain. 

“I shan’t be gone long.  You come, too.”

We always said that last line together.

Windows and mirrors, of course.  Story at its best allows us to discover both the other and ourselves.  But it does even more.  Story shared creates bonds.

You . . . me . . . us.  Together!

“You come, too!”