Thoughtful Thursday-Over and Over

In both my childhood and my children's, I missed this wonderful book by Charlotte Zolotow. I was inroduced to it by a recent article in The Horn Book by her daughter, Crescent Dragonwagon. Here is how it begins:

“Once there was a little girl who didn’t understand about time.”

So, with deceptive simplicity — for who, of any age, does understand time? — did my mother, Charlotte Zolotow, begin her book Over and Over, first published in 1957.
As I write these words today, Charlotte is ninety-seven and I am fifty-nine. I see to her care. When she wrote Over and Over, she was forty-two and I was four, and she saw to mine. It is also fall, maybe her last on this green-and-gold spinning globe. At this intersection Over and Over, about cycles, seems to me celebratory, bittersweet, and comforting. Its meaning and its text — first read aloud to me by my mother before I was myself able to read — seem almost as enduring as the cycles of death and renewal themselves.

I highly recommend both the article and the book.