Twig, Elizabeth Orton Jones

I may have read this book more than any other in my whole life; not this specific copy, this one was found for me by my brother at a big Board of Education Library book cull in the Seventies. I don't know what happened to the original, maybe I read it all up. I think it was my mother's, and it had a green cloth cover, like this one does under the dust-jacket and library plastic. Gotta hand it to the library folks, this book is still in fantastic shape thirty years after being dumped.
   In the story, Twig, who has nothing and lives among people who have nothing, meanders down the stairs of her tenement building meeting her neighbours, all of whom give her something that is useless to them, but which Twig incorporates into the little world she builds in the dirt yard below, and which they all populate in miniature, after a fairy pops by. The story is a heroquest, in a sense; a descending into another world and finding a way back home renewed, but it's also about the microcosm and the macrocosm: what is true in the one is true in the other, so, wherever we are, whoever we are, if we all just give a little, we can make a loving and supportive world. It was a story simple enough that I could understand it, but complicated and intricate enough that it bore many readings, and it was structured in a cycle, since she starts and ends in the same place, and everything in the world above appears in the tiny world below. Thinking about it as an adult, and why it was so compelling to me long ago, I can't help noticing the theme of childhood, as Twig parents herself with whatever the adult world provides, but without any guidance. As a result, we never know if some fairy spell made her small enough to ride on a sparrow's back, or she's just playing in the dirt, but whatever she's doing, she's making her own lovely world from the leftover, picked-apart ratty-ass bits she is given. And that still inspires me.
   This book runs in my blood. It was a haven of hope in a weird world. You don't fling those away.
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