Picture Books

They were our favourites. The books my sisters and I would check out of the local library again and again as children. The ones with pages full of pictures that drew you into a perfectly-created world, one that was often precisely-drawn but full of atmosphere, heavy with an illustrator’s subtle magic.

The Storm Book, for example, with its tale of an epic storm rolling across a North American landscape, from rocky coast to hilly heartland. The page with the city at night, thin apartment buildings looming over a dark square shiny with rain, umbrellas spots of colour amid drowned streetlights and orbs of headlights and the rectangles of glowing yellow where people who lived in the city had drawn their blinds down…but not quite all the way. The cat looking out of the eighth-storey window.

Or the page with the mother rocking a perfectly-swaddled baby in the homey living room of some country house, a pale pink apron, a vase of drooping daisies, the radiators and the braided rugs so real you could imagine the heat, the roughness of the cloth weave, as the rain drummed the blackened windows and she waited for her husband to come home.

There was the “I Love my Home” book, with pages of different homes, all perfectly cozy and unique. The Victorian seaside house, the snug log cabin, the family who lived – can you believe it? – atop a grocery store! Or the houseboat that “floated by.”

“One Morning in Maine” was a favourite. All those blue and white lush ink drawings of rugged coastal trees and waves and boats ferrying the family to town to buy a new switch for the motor or new jars for canning blueberries.

I think of these books often now, a few decades later. I think of them on evenings like this, when someone urges me to look out the window at the sickle moon hanging over the city in the twilight, all the windows glowing different shades of yellow. I think of them when I see my sister stand by the lakeshore, dress blowing in the wind, holding her daughter up to see the view. When I see the awesome span of a bridge over a canyon, or a tugboat pulling a float of logs down the river, I think of picture books and the feeling they gave me as a child, that all was full of magic. That everywhere you looked there was a picture, and that this picture told you so much.

I think that as children, we didn’t simply like the drawings because they were pretty. There was something about them that both conveyed comfort and fed our hunger for newness. I would go so far as to say that these drawings conveyed the idea that there was something of endless discovery and even order and beauty in life.

Watching the city lights blink on across the bay, I often decry my tendency to “romanticize” the view. Curled in bed basking in the coziness of a lamp, a colourful quilt, a radio turned on low…I often shove aside the delight that bubbles to the surface.

But what is wrong with this tendency to frame moments? To see in the lit windows of my street, a storybook?

After all, to say that we must strive to see things “as they are” is ultimately an exercise in futility. None of us see things as they are. You cannot strip fully what informs the person’s gaze from what the person sees.

And isn’t it what we see things through that is perhaps most important? The experience and meaning we attach to the sight? If I can, in the moment I see the sickle moon hanging above the homes, dwell in the moment of flame that flickers in me, perhaps even reflect upon it, I may come to understand something important. Perhaps about myself. Perhaps about something else.

That to me, seems more important than seeing precisely what some might say the view out my window “literally” is – a quarter-moon above an average street in an average city. Oh no, it’s shining a pale gold, suspended in a smoky blue evening, with an untidy stack of large and small apartment buildings below, chock-full of wily cats, fuzzy pink slippers, and spindly old bicycles.

It’s a page from my life.