![]() ![]() When Mae sees Winnie, she shares her son’s dismay, and she quickly decides that Winnie must not return home, not until they have had a chance to take her to Angus, her husband and the father of the boys. The fact that someone else now knows about it seems to frighten him, and while he’s trying to decide what to do, his Mother Mae and his older brother Miles walk into the clearing. Winnie is hot and thirsty, but Jesse warns her against drinking from the hidden spring. Jesse Tuck is one hundred and four years old… all because of the spring. He appears to be seventeen, and he was, once - eighty seven years before. ![]() As their eyes meet, Winnie instantly loses her heart to him he is the most beautiful person she has ever seen. At first he doesn’t realize that Winnie is there, watching him when he does become aware of her presence, he stands and silently looks at her. ![]() He’s drinking from the spring, which he has uncovered by shifting aside the stones that usually conceal it. She sees two things there - a single, enormous tree with a small spring seeping from its base, and a young man. Before she knows it, she is standing in a little clearing, hidden in the center of the surrounding trees. She has never gone into it before, and has a vague notion of running away. It is only a few acres in extent, the sole remaining fragment of what was once a mighty forest. One morning, defying her parents’ prohibitions, Winnie slips out of her yard and runs into a nearby wood that her family owns. Before the hot August days are over, though, Winnie will have an encounter that will change her life forever, and she’ll be faced with a momentous and irrevocable choice. Her overprotective family won’t let her roam, won’t let her experience all that she wants to her world is cruelly circumscribed by the white picket fence that keeps her safely penned in her front yard. In the little town of Treegap, in the first week of August in the year 1880, ten year old Winnie Foster feels like life’s possibilities have already dried up. Books like this are assured of long lives…books like Natalie Babbitt’s 1975 children’s fantasy, Tuck Everlasting. Such books are themselves like fearless, inquisitive children they’re willing to speak their minds, whatever the consequences. It’s also why reading great children’s literature can be such a wonderful, renewing experience such books are addressed to an audience that hasn’t yet gotten into the fatal habit of thinking that all questions have either already been answered or are unanswerable. ![]() This is one of the reasons children can keep you feeling young… when they’re not making you feel ancient. Tough questions don’t cease to be questions, though, just because we grow too experienced, too jaded, too busy, too complacent, too disappointed, too bored - too old to be willing to ask them ourselves. The hard ones can range from the mathematical, such as “What if there was no such thing as five?” to the epistemological, like “How do you know?” The roughest ones are literally life and death: “Why did my puppy, why did my friend, why did my Grandpa have to die?” When faced with these, too often the adult impulse is to brush the child off with a pat answer that answers nothing, or better yet, to quickly change the subject. Not all childish questions are so easily disposed of, however. (In my house, we have long had a standard reply to this kind of query, taken from a Ring Lardner short story: “Shut up, he explained.”) “Can I have some more?” “Why not?” “Are we there yet?” “Do I have to?” These questions and many others are familiar to everyone who deals with children, and they (the questions, that is) usually don’t pose much of a problem. If you have children at home, you know their propensity for asking questions. ![]()
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