Books were a very integral part of my growing up years, therefore, when I became a mother, I wanted my children to also have a love of good books. I began reading to my girls very early in their lives – as a matter of fact, I read to them before they were born!
When they were infants, I would hold my girls in my lap, a book in front of them, and read the story while letting them see the pictures. Hence, both of my daughters have grown up with a love for reading. We read at playtime, after supper, before bedtime, and often several times in-between!
There is one book that we read for many years and was always associated with Thanksgiving; it was, Amy’s Goose, written by Efner Tudor Holmes and illustrated by the infamous illustrator, Tasha Tudor. It is the story about a flock of geese that come each fall to the same farm as they are headed south for the winter. The little girl, Amy, that lives there, has come to consider these geese as “her geese.” She could hardly wait for their return each year.
“Dinner seemed to Amy to be taking unusually long. Ordinarily she loved sitting there in the dining room with all three of them together, and the candles casting soft shadows on the warm wood-paneled walls. The room smelled of freshly baked apple and pumpkin pies. But Amy’s thoughts were with the geese out on the moonlit lake. Her geese, she thought. They had remembered, and had come back to her again!”
This little girl finds that one goose is sick and nurses it back to health, then struggles to decide whether to keep it on the farm or let it be free. It is a sweet story of love and surrender.
I can’t resist each Thanksgiving of getting out our copy of Amy’s Goose and setting it on the coffee table. It speaks as loudly of family time for the Cunningham’s as Tom Turkey in the middle of the dining room table does for others. As we sat together in those early years to pour over the pictures and words of our books, we were also pouring into one another’s lives, and it knit our hearts together in a way that no other form of media really could. Though the story tells of love and surrender, when I see Amy’s Goose, I think of love and togetherness, because that’s what that book and many, many others created in our parsonage home.
Do you have memories of reading in your childhood years? What are some of your favorites?
From inside the parsonage,
RefreshHer 