Story of the Day 4/23/12

Despite a wee bit of grumbling from a teenager who shall not be named, I sat down with the kids to read a story today.  I took this one out a while ago, but tucked it into a bookcase, and well, you know how that goes.  Bookcases are like black holes here, eating up books that you're absolutely positive you put there just days ago.  Luckily, I found this one.



The Wild Horses of Sweetbriar, written by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock and illustrated by Ted Rand, is a sweet tale of a girl living on an island off of the coast of Nantucket.  The girl's father works for the Coast Guard, and is only able to come home once per week.  The rest of the time, it's just the girl and her mother on the tiny island-- as well as the horses and other wildlife!

(A note in the book says that the story is based on a true incident that occurred on Tuckernuck Island (also off the coast of Nantucket) in 1895, although this story takes place in 1903.)

The young girl, almost 8 years old and never named, is the narrator of the story.  She tells of her love for the island, the solitude, the wild roses and the wild sea, the smell of which was "so thick that I could have spread it on bread like jam."  But most of all, she loves the wild horses.  Her father thinks that they must have come from Nantucket when Sweetbriar Island (fictional) was still connected to the larger island.

The winter comes early that year, with snow falling in November and never melting,"not once, though that whole long winter."  Of course, the girl is concerned about the horses, who are so hungry, they show up at the girl's home, pawing at the walls and whinnying.  The girl and her mama give them what food they can, but the horses get pitifully thin as the winter drags on.

Thankfully, spring arrives in time, and the horses are okay. :)

The girl and her family remain on the island until the summer, when the roses are back in bloom.  Her father gets restationed, and they move to a more populated area (a great relief to her mother!).

In the final pages of the book, the narrator, now an adult, looks back on her one short year on Sweetbriar Island.  She confesses that she has never gone back, because she "was afraid the island wouldn't be as I remembered."



I got a bit choked up at the end (although I hid it well from my kids)--I think we all have a childhood memory that we cherish so dearly that we want it to stay perfect in our memory, not marred by the reality of the present.