I found this book in a local antique shop on a day of wandering. Its the perfect size, good quality binding and paper, simple good writing, and a hundred years old.
Sitting outside on a different day I read from it The Tinkers Willow -by Edward Frents.
Just four and a half small pages in a little book, but generations of memories mingled in the cool breeze that was blowing on my face and the voice of the wind in the story.
This book is actually a school chilld's reading book from the 1920's.. It says in the Forward pages "We have tried to make living books, filled with living material, presented in a form to stir the emotions and to inspire youth to noble action."
The stories in the book are for ages nine and up. I am up way past nine and I love these little stories. The beauty of the writing that I have read so far in this book is that the stories are real. Not sensational, not driven by educational curriculum standards. Just the stories that families had and remembered and shared. There are good stories of good people that need to come back in and bring back the balance of memory with the simple, real, people.
The curator of the stories in this school reading book wrote in 1926 " There was never a time when the schools needed more than now to re-éxamine what they are teaching and the way they are teaching, to the end that emphasis may be placed where it belongs, upon life and the things that make for useful and worthy living"
The tinker wasn't a super hero, and he didn't ask the boy what his super power was. He just put his hands on a stick, used his knife with skill, tapped into his connection with Nature, caused a stick to whistle, and breathed life back into a branch to grow again into a tree. In that memory the soil was black and life was fertile and people just were who they were.
It is good to just sit and listen to the voice of the wind and remember that music can come from a stick .
SCHOOLERS. OLD BOOKS. STORIES. OLD SCHOOL
