When I was very young, one of my favorite books was
I Like to be Little by Charlotte Zolotow. In the story, a girl regales her mother with all the reasons it is far better to be a child than a grown-up. She may jump in the leaves when they fall about the trees, and she may sit underneath the dining room table, tracing her finger across the rose-patterned rug as she dreams up worlds all her own.
These images have been floating through my mind for the past few weeks, as I've glided through the Meadows on my bike, my eyes lingering on the coppery, sun-drenched leaves, wishing I could rake them up and leap into them as I used to. This week as I was riding through, a small boy bounded into the piles a man swept up, jumping before they reached any height, bouncing with energy, too eager to wait. He ran into a small pile, half-raked, and collided with the man's leg, wrapping his small arms around and hugging, grinning. I smiled, too. Memories of leaf collection days rushed back, when my father swept the layers of crisp colors up from the grass, mounding them into piles three or four feet high, stretching thirty of forty feet from one end of the yard to the other.
On Wednesday, as I checked the news, I discovered that Ms. Zolotow had died on Tuesday. She was ninety-eight, and she was a very established children's book editor as well as an author, and apparently she was known for delving into topics deemed unsuitable for children. My favorite discovery in this beautifully written obituary, is a quote from Zolotow. She once wrote, "We are all the same, except that adults have found ways to
buffer themselves against the full-blown intensity of a child’s
emotions. We are not different from the children we were — only more
experienced, better able to disguise our feelings from others, if not
ourselves.”
