Roseate Spoonbills

Roseate Spoonbills
Hilary Flower


It was an invitation from the bay. The tide was out. Way out, revealing a great expanse of sandy bottom and hinting of sea creatures to be discovered. It reminded me of the children’s book where of one of the “Five Chinese Brothers” sucks up the whole ocean so that his other brother won’t drown. I saw this on my morning walk, and raced back to get my then-five-year-old daughter and two-year-old son.

When we got to Beach Drive we turned and headed up along it. I wanted to go several blocks to the end, where the muck extended furthest out. But we were only about a third of the way there when, gazing out at the egrets and ibises and herons in the shallows I saw a flash of pink—and then another! Four roseate spoonbills—right in our neighborhood! Astounding! We brought the stroller and bike up over the curb and took off running down the slope and across the wet and spongey dollar grass.

Taking off my flip-flops I discovered that the muck was oozier and squishier than I had expected; my feet sank down a few inches with each step. For yards the exposed ground was perforated with little two-foot-diameter pools. As my children tucked their attention into the hermit crabs and snails in the miniature pools, I shaded my eyes to admire the four roseate spoonbills.

I had never seen one so close, just two occasions seeing one fly overhead, and two occasions finding a bright pink feather on the beach. A streak of near crimson on their wings, fading up to frost on their backs. In the low morning sun their bills, when they would lift them out to munch and swallow a fish, were tipped with a fat glint of silver.

The closest roseate spoonbill shook her richly colorful wings and started to glide a foot or so over the glassy water. The others followed her off to another spot a little ways down the bay—one, two, three, four.

For the rest of the morning I sat on the bench munching crackers with my son, who was singing a loud song about dogs. My daughter exulted in the muck calling out a streaming narrative to me about the little rivers she was creating with her hands, instructing me on how to find the snails, making sure I watched her every jump into the pools. She was nothing less than ecstatic. As I watched my daughter leap knees up in a circular mud pool, it struck me that most of being a parent is showing up and letting childhood unfold. The perfection of that moment was complete, not hampered in the slightest by any past shortcomings of mine as a mother, not made possible by my careful planning.

Eventually I noticed that the polka-dot pattern of muck pools had been replaced by glassy water creeping up behind my daughter. I could barely see the pink of the spoonbills, way off by the sandbar on the horizon, chased there by happy dogs. I decide that, if elusive, these moments of divine sweetness that open up for us from time to time are no more or less real than our moments of confusion and conflict. And they are no more or less in my control than the times when life seems broken, funky, or awash in bad luck. This, indeed, is the lesson I have been teaching myself, and un-learning, and realizing again, since becoming a mother of two. As we made our way home, I wanted to finally accept the truth of it, keep it in my pocket to hold and rub like a smooth stone.

Thanksgiving, Hold the Malarky

Thanksgiving, Hold the Malarky
Hilary Flower


It’s that time of year again. And this year, now that my eldest is seven, I feel it’s time. Time to roll up our sleeves, and kick some Pilgrim ass.

When I was a kid, November was a time of relentless black steeple hats with buckles, black-and-white dressed Pilgrims with their hearty smiles holding hands with near-naked be-feathered Indians at well-set tables graced with those wacky cornucopias. Oh the coloring sheets, the pageants, the picture books, the mimeographed worksheets. It was with a great degree of cynicism that I eventually learned that I had been handed a cornucopia of bullshit.

Now as a mama of homeschooling kids I savor the fact that my children have a very low probability of ever making a single black construction-paper pilgrim hat. On the contrary, as part of their history lesson, in time, they will come to learn how the term “genocide” fits into Indian-American relations, both historically and today. But this year will be just our first steps. In past years we have had our own quirky celebration of Thanksgiving, but there was no Pilgrim story attached to it. The very concept of history is still vague to my children, mostly being defined as “the time before there were stores.”

So it was with some relish that I pulled up google and plugged in the search terms “pilgrim,” “Thanksgiving” and “myth.” My cynicism was well rewarded.
First off, the pilgrims may have worn cloth caps to keep their heads warm. But that’s it. No big black numbers. And no buckles for their hats, pants, or shoes. The Victorians made Thanksgiving into a National holiday, and eventually brought the pilgrim harvest feast into the picture, complete with their own, um, creative interpretations. It was the Victorians who provided the buckles in order to make the Pilgrims look quaint. And there is absolutely no reason to believe they wore black and white clothes.

And it was the Victorians who appreciated a lavishly set table with turkey, cranberry sauce, yams, cornbread, and pumpkin pie. The Pilgrims may or may not have had turkey; the only historical account just mentions a lot of (wild) fowl. I’m inclined to let that one go. But neither yams nor sweet potatoes had been introduced to the New World yet (not to mention mini-marshmallows). They didn’t make cranberry sauce, since they had nothing to sweeten it with. And historians say that the Pilgrims, having no utensils or plates, and knowing nothing about germs, most likely scooped food with their hands straight out of communal bowls. (Yeah! How I wish I could share that detail with my uptight late-grandmother. My kids have been using that authentic approach for years.)

And common sense alone determines that in November in New England the Wampanoag people were certainly NOT dressed in their birthday suits plus loin cloths; write another one off to the spice-it-up Victorians. Nor were the Wampanoag people into feathered headdresses or Mohawks, as frequently depicted.

It’s hard to find picture books that don’t promote these same tired myths, botch basic facts, or invent new embellishments of their own. I pulled a stack of books from the library, discarded half, and am left with a small stack of ones that, if not fully truthful, are at least not a free-for-all.

But even one of the best of the lot, Don’t Know Much About: The Pilgrims lives up to its title. It’s introduction boasts about all the myth-busting the book is going to do, and yet on the very next page it goes into detail about the Pilgrims being Puritans. No they weren’t. They were Separatists; they did not feel the Church of England was capable of reform, or “purification;” the Puritans were a distinct group of settlers who came much later. And in this book’s section on Thanksgiving Day, the author can’t resist making up a whole set of imagined festivities, including target practice (the settlers using rifles and the Indians bows and arrows), a military parade, the Indians dancing, and so on. I would go along with it if they had prefaced that section with “We will never know for sure, but we imagine that perhaps….” Why do children’s nonfiction books play so fast and loose with the boundary between historical fact and fiction? I think children deserve better.

As far as I can gather, long ago, in the autumn of 1621, there was a spontaneous four day harvest feast shared by early American settlers and 90 or so Wampanoag people who brought deer. The settlers had just gotten through their first winter in the New World, and not all had survived. Yet they were experiencing wondrous bounty and warm relations with the Indians they had once feared. What a fascinating time in our history, made more human and intriguing by stripping off the Victorian embellishments. It makes a useful starting place for talking about the founding of our country, and the later, tragic, chapters in Early American—Native American relations.

As we sit with our Pilgrim books, I talk to my children about where the limits of facts end and where the guessing, and myth-making, begins. It’s a lot to talk about. A lot to process, even if you start with a very small piece of the story.
And way more questions than I can answer.

“Why did they come?”

“Why was it hard to survive?”

“Why do the books not agree about what happened?”

“Why did the early Americans end up taking the country away from the Native Americans, instead of sharing it?”

Okay so I jumped a little ahead by accident and told them a little more than the 1621 part of the story. Got a little too deep too fast. I remind myself that these are just our first steps. And that as the years go by my children can find more and more answers for themselves. And whatever we do, they don’t have to make one single fucking pilgrim hat.

Gretchen Fairy

Gretchen Fairy
Hilary Flower


There once was a girl named Gretchen. She really wanted to become a fairy. She thought the pond behind her house would be the right spot for fairies to hang out. So she went down there and looked for fairies. No fairies.

After a while she sat down and closed her eyes. A tear ran down her cheek because she thought maybe she would never get to become a fairy. A fairy came by--but she didn't see it! So the fairy flew right up to her face and called out to her: "Hey girl!" But she didn't hear the fairy. The fairy got right on her nose. When Gretchen opened her eyes she was staring right at a fairy flapping and calling out to her!

"Hey girl, girl! Why are you sad?" said the fairy.

"My name is Gretchen," said the girl. "But I always wanted to be a fairy. Can you grant wishes?"

"My name is Princess Fairy," said the fairy. "But I am sorry to say that I don't have any more wishes left for the day." It was a sad moment. Princess Fairy flapped her wings for a moment while she thought. Then she had a new idea. "Well I could get my 3-yr-old sister fairy Threedia to turn you into a fairy!"

"Okay!" said Gretchen.

So Princess Fairy flew to her house up in the clouds and brought down Threedia. Threedia said "Hi!" in her rowdy three-year-old voice.

"I want to become a fairy," smiled Gretchen eagerly.

"Okay, you're a fairy!" announced Threedia proudly. "Now go to that rock and jump off. You’ll fly!"

Gretchen couldn't believe it--could she really be a fairy? She ran to the rock, stood at the top, and leapt off!

And THUMP, BUMP, fell on her RUMP.

"HEY!" said Gretchen.

“Oh, uh, sorry!” cried Threedia. “This is my first try at granting a wish. I guess my wishes are not very strong yet, huh? We might have to help MAKE it happen.” She flew circles in front of Gretchen for a while. “I know! We fairies drink nectar. Maybe you should go over to a bush and find a flower and drink the nectar.”

So Gretchen ran over to the Hibiscus bush by her house and pulled off a big yellow flower, slipped out the nectar wand, and licked the sweet drop. Then she ran over to the rock. Could she really be a fairy? She couldn’t wait to find out. She leapt off!

And THUMP, BUMP, fell on her RUMP.

"HEY!" said Gretchen.

“Oh, sorry, sorry,” said Threedia. She flew circles in front of Gretchen again. She was getting nervous, but she hadn’t given up yet. “I know, maybe you need to drink all of the nectar from all of the flowers in the whole world!”

Gretchen thought about this. She really wanted to be a fairy. Could she really drink all of the nectar from all of the flowers in the whole world? She decided to do it. She went all around the world and drank all of the nectar from all of the yellow flowers, all of the blue flowers, all of the green flowers, all of the pink flowers, all of the purple flowers, all of the orange flowers, all of the black flowers, and, you get the idea, all of the striped and polka-dotted flowers and all the flowers in the whole world.

Her tummy was really full… and she really had to pee. But she ran over to the rock. Could she really be a fairy? She had worked so hard. She was ready to find out. She leapt off!

And THUMP, BUMP, fell on her RUMP. And peed a huge puddle!

"HEY!" said Gretchen. She ran to her house, got cleaned up, changed her clothes, and ran back outside.

“Hi,” Threedia greeted her enthusiastically. “I had a new idea! Butterflies fly, too, right? So get a butterfly to help you!”

Gretchen ran over to the red and orange lantana bushes alongside her house and hunted until she found a monarch butterfly. “Excuse me, Butterfly? Would you help me? I am trying to fly but I can’t get off the ground. Could you perch on my arm? And then when I jump off the rock—you flap your wings to help me fly! Okay?”

The butterfly flapped her wings in a friendly way, and fluttered onto her arm. It was great to have the help of a strong and beautiful winged creature. Gretchen ran over to the rock. Could she really be a fairy? She gave a little smile to her helper butterfly. “This is it,” she called out. And she leapt off! “Now, Butterfly, flap, flap!” And she flapped and the butterfly flapped and for a second there she thought she was in the air!

Then THUMP, BUMP, she fell on her RUMP.

"HEY!" said Gretchen.

“Oh, OOPS!” said Threedia. She flew determined circles around Gretchen, swooping and thinking and swooping past again. “I have got it! How about if you get ALL of the butterflies in the whole world to help you? That’s gotta make a difference!”

Gretchen thought about this. She was getting tired of all this work. But she had wanted to be a fairy her whole life. So she went all around the world and talked to all of the butterflies. And thankfully, each one of the butterflies said yes: the black and yellow butterflies, the orange and black butterflies, the yellow butterflies, the blue butterflies, the brown butterflies, the green butterflies, the white butterflies, all of them. By the time she was done she was covered in a rainbow of butterflies. She had butterflies on her arms, on her shoulders, on her head, on her ears, on her tush, on the tops of her feet, everywhere they could perch.

She could barely walk because although each butterfly weighed only a little, when you have all the butterflies in the whole world on you, it’s heavy! She lumbered over to the rock. She lifted her heavy arms. Could she really be a fairy? She leapt off! “Now, butterflies, flap, FLAP!” She flapped her heavy arms, and all of the butterflies in the whole world flapped their little wings.

And she was in the air! And she looked around her and all of the butterflies were flying OFF of her in a cloud of color. And she was not falling—she was flying with them! Up and around and around and up she was flying! Threedia flew up to join her! She noticed that she was the same size as Threedia and the butterflies, and when she peeked over her shoulders she saw shimmering lavender wings.

“I’m a fairy, I’m a fairy!” she squealed.

“Let’s call you Gretchen Fairy!” chirped Threedia. And off they flew into the sky.