The Rabbit-Trailer’s Soundtrack

B000000pg301_scmzzzzzzz_Yesterday my kids pulled out a CD we used to listen to all the time: the soundtrack to Snoopy: The Musical. This was a play I loved as a teenager, when it was performed by some friends at a different high school. I had a crackly tape recording of a dress rehearsal which my sisters and I listened to ad nauseum. We had, after all, outgrown the soundtrack to Annie by then, and I had yet to discover the melodramatic satisfaction that is Les Miz.

So when Jane was five or six and I, for no particular reason, found myself humming one of the dear old Snoopy songs, I hunted around online and found a recording. Ah, the bliss of Google! My tiny girls loved the album, as I knew they would. A singing dog! A boy named Linus! A squeaky-voiced Sally belting out tongue-twisters!

Later, as the girls grew, they connected to Snoopy on different terms. One of our favorite songs on the album, “Clouds,” is like a theme song for homeschoolers. Charlie Brown and the gang are lying around looking at the sky, and someone asks Charlie Brown what he sees in the clouds.

“I see a—” he begins, but Sally cuts him off to sing that she sees: “A mermaid riding on a unicorn.” Peppermint Patty sees “an angel blowing on a big long horn.” Linus, ever my favorite, is a visionary. “I see Goliath, half a mile tall, waving at me….what do you see?”

Poor Charlie Brown. How can he get an answer in edgewise? Lucy sees a team of fifty milk-white horses; Patty sees a dinosaur; Linus sees Prometheus, waving; Snoopy, grandiose as always, sees the Civil War. The entire Civil War.

You could spend a year rabbit-trailing your way through this song. The Peanuts gang know their history, I’ll give ’em that. (Although they seem to hit a bit of a roadblock when it comes to a certain American poet/storyteller, as evinced by their poor classroom performance in the hilarous song “Edgar Allen Poe,” elsewhere on the album.) When these kids gaze at the clouds, they see Caesar crossing the Rubicon, the Fall of Rome, and even all twelve apostles, waving at Linus.

Linus: “The Pyramid of Khufu!”

Sally: “You too?”

All but Charlie Brown: “Seven Wonders of the World…”

For our family, this is a song of reciprocal delights. Some of these cloud-tableaux are historical events the girls already knew about, and the idea of Snoopy beholding an entire war sculpted in cumulus is irresistibly funny. Some events are things my kids first encountered in the song. When, years later, we read about the Rubicon in A Child’s History of the World, there were gasps of delighted recognition from everyone including the then-two-year-old. Click, another connection is made.

So I was happy to hear the Peanuts gang belting away once more yesterday afternoon. It has been a couple of years since last they regaled us with their splendid visions. The girls have encountered more of the world, more of the past, and so they have more to connect with in the lyrics of Charlie Brown’s imaginative friends.

As for Charles, alas. The gang, having at long last exhausted the gamut of grand happenings to see in the heavens, demand of Charlie, “Well, what do you see?”

Says Charlie, glumly (and you probably remember the punchline from the Sunday funnies when you were a kid): “I was going to say a horsie and a ducky, but I changed my mind.”

(Cue hysterical laughter from little girls. Every. Single. Time.)

Fair-Weather Mom

NaturejournalI’m a wimp in the cold. Much as I respect the Charlotte Mason “get out for a walk every day, no matter what the weather” principle, I don’t live by it. No well-bundled foul-weather treks for me, invigorating though they might be. The children are encouraged to get outside for fresh air every day, but if they want my company, they have to settle for the sofa, the fireside, and a good book. Preferably one full of heroic wilderness adventures in the elements.

But as soon as the weather begins to turn, oh, I’m there. Just try and keep me inside. Housework? Pah! The floors can take care of themselves. The kids and I have paths to tread, shoes to muddy, trees to meet.

In addition to field guides and the indispensible Handbook of Nature Study by Anna Botsford Comstock, there are a few other books that leap off the shelves at me this time every year:

Wild Days by Karen Skidmore Rackliffe

Keeping a Nature Journal by Clare Walker Leslie and Charles E. Roth

Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots and Sunflower Houses by Sharon Lovejoy

Mrs. Greenthumbs by Cassandra Danz (for adults only)

Noah’s Garden and Planting Noah’s Garden by Sara Stein

Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katharine White (A collection of gardening essays by the wife of E.B. White).

These old friends keep us busy during the wet and chilly days of March. Come April, we’re outside living the adventure instead of reading about it. I am intrepid! I am daring! No breeze is too balmy, no creek too melodic, no backpack too full of snacks for this nature-loving mother.

That is, until the weather turns hot.