Was she right? Perhaps Woodland was the best place to look for an ethical model. I was being brought up on the morality of a make-believe rabbit. ![]() My mother expected my brothers and me to be as kind and well-mannered as Uncle Wiggily, and also as energetic, successful, and well-groomed. I was known at school as the granddaughter of Uncle Wiggily. The Uncle Wiggily Stories were the bestselling children's books in America for decades before I was born and my grandfather was still a celebrity on their account. His name was Uncle Wiggily, and he inhabited Woodland with Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy and their animal friends. After writing hundreds of books in numerous popular children's series, he became rich and famous by creating a rabbit who wore a top hat and tails and lived in the most idyllic small town America ever produced. But the stories that held us most in thrall were fashioned by my grandfather, and their most distilled form was also the most improbable. The stirring story of my grandmother's life: suffragette, pioneer newspaper woman, author of books. Dad's often-told tales of traveling through the desert with an Egyptian prince, Mom's romantic memory of falling in love with the most debonair, handsome, sophisticated man she had ever met: my father. The fact was that when I looked around my own life, I saw something so similar in its physical outlines to that mythic ideal that fictional boundaries tended to fade in my unformed, overactive mind. I was inside the boundless optimism and could hardly wait for time to unfold its treasures. Granny or Grampy-I wasn't sure which-wrote it. How warm and cozy it was in Snow Lodge! How bright were the lights, and how the big fire blazed and crackled and roared up the chimney! And what a delightful smell came from the kitchen! I knew this without a doubt because we were wrapped in a dream of perfection, a dream created and refined in vivid detail by the collective imagination of my family. The problem was, I had too much information.Ī good person is happy a happy person is good. There were certain confusing incidents I was trying to interpret, and I hoped I was on the trail of truth. I was like blood flowing through a vein, silent and purposeful. ![]() Faint light seeped in from the square doors that opened on each floor. It was dark inside the box, but never entirely black. Two lengths, thick and prickly, were suspended side by side. I sat with my knees up: sometimes I clasped my arms around my legs, sometimes I kept my hands on the rope that extended in a loop from the top of the house to the bottom. In those years I spent a lot of time in the dumbwaiter, moving up and down behind the walls, listening to voices.
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