Abstract:

A cancelled visit to the literary landscape of a favorite childrens' book series sparks Laura Reasoner Jones to think about place and story.

Jones, L.R. Deep valley disappointment. Teacher Leaders Network diaries. Retrieved from the Teacher Leaders Network 11 Apr 2008. Link: http://www.teacherleaders.org/old_site/diaries04_05/LJ36_04_05.html 

Full Text:

Deep Valley Disappointment

I am so, as we said when I was young, "bummed out." I am totally and completely disappointed. My summer vacation plans have been changed and I will probably never ever get to go on the "Betsy-Tacy" Walking Tour.

We had big plans this summer. My whole formerly Hoosier family was meeting in Minneapolis for a reunion to meet our newest niece. And as a part of that wild-and-crazy time, any of "the girls" who wanted to were going to drive down to Mankato, a.k.a. Deep Valley, and take the walking tour of the sights found in the Betsy-Tacy books. This is a sweet, harmless, very wholesome series of books that my sisters and I read when we were children. I read them to my girls as part of their going to bed routine when they were little. And Minnesotans have managed to preserve the places in this small town that the author wrote about, houses from 1900. It's a good thing I am not enamored of any literary landmarks from around here where I live, not that there are any, because our Town Council and Board of Supervisors seem to be determined to tear down every old farm house and pave over every blade of grass. No Tree Left Behind is their motto.

Place and story — those are my things. As I have mentioned before, I read all of the time. And I like to read books that are written in series, probably a throwback to my childhood when my brothers and sisters and I read all those series of books for children — the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, the Boxcar Children, and the Five Little Peppers. Those series of books always seemed to be set in generic towns somewhere in the North (because they had seasons) and near water (because the kids always seemed to be getting into trouble with boats). Those series didn't create much of a sense of place. But series like the Betsy-Tacy books and the Anne of Green Gables books are imbued with a sense of where the characters (and authors) lived, and readers like me can picture the towns and the people.

There is always a risk in visiting these places, however. I am not completely sure if I want to see the actual house where Betsy lived, or the Green Gables farmhouse. Prince Edward Island has turned Anne into a major tourist industry, and I don't know if I want my personal memories and interpretations spoiled. And I don't know if I want to go somewhere and be part of a large group either — I want to just remember these books on my own, without any help from the tourism board. So, it's a dilemma. And maybe it is better that the planned tour was cancelled.

On the other hand, the last time we went to North Carolina, I was lucky enough to have checked out the latest Sharyn McCrumb mystery set in the Appalachians. I read that as we drove the Blue Ridge Parkway in October. It was an experience that I would highly recommend: passing slowly through the mountains of a story and imagining the renegade soldiers in the misty hills.

I think that is one reason I am so intrigued by (obsessed with) my dead-people pictures. Now that I have identified and catalogued most of the people in the 500+ pictures coming down through the family, I feel like I know them, although they have all been dead for many years. I know where they lived, I know who they married, and I know how, when and where they died. I have newspaper articles detailing their social lives and their births and deaths. I have postcards sent from their vacations and their trips to see new babies.

But there is so much of the story I will never know. I don't know why we never knew my grandmother's cousins and their families who were pictured in over a third of the images I have, and who lived not ten miles from the lake where we spent all of our summers as children. I will never know why I had to find out from an old obituary that the art teacher at my high school was in my Gram's wedding. She too was a child in a bunch of the pictures, but never identified herself to the five of us as we went through the high school. Did my great-grandfather's suicide in 1913 in Peru, Indiana have anything to do with the flood that destroyed the town and the circus earlier that year? What happened in these families?

It's strange the kind of hold that 'place' can have over you. As I get older, I realize that my Hoosier upbringing was a lot more than basketball, Memorial Day races, and meatloaf. It was friendliness in grocery stores, letting people merge in on highways at 65 mph and needing to be able to drive around the block and come out in the same place.

My daughter Christie is learning about 'place' now as she settles into her first real home after college. She has lived away from Northern Virginia for years but has never bought a house or joined a church or registered to vote or changed her car insurance until now. And she calls with tales of that strange land called Indiana, marveling at things that I have missed for years. She runs into her bagel place in the morning (Bagel places in Indiana? My, how things have changed!) and stands in line impatiently while the servers chat with each person in line in front of her. She says, over and over, "People are so nice, but they are so slow." But I am very glad that she has been able to experience a different kind of 'place' for herself, something that she can hold in her heart.

The books I read as a child may be a little sentimental or outdated now, and some are even a little preachy for my tastes. But the stories and the places are still alive to me and I treasure them. And I hope that my girls and my nieces will have the same kinds of memories, either about their own favorite books or the family stories and places we have given to them.

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